I finally finished Vanity Fair, by William Thackeray, on the way home this week. I’ve taken nearly two months to read it- not because by reading speed has taken a sudden plunge or because the language is excessively tedious or sludgy, but because Vanity Fair is a frightening book. There’s only so much of it you can take at a time before getting scared of what’s going to happen next.
This is because Thackeray skewers his characters, his readers, and the human race at large with the same happy indiscrimination with which Vikram goes about whacking people with golf clubs. Of course, Thackeray uses very subtle, very witty English instead of a nine iron, but you can’t help feeling uneasy around him all the same. He’ll build up characters and paint them in glowing terms, and then suddenly whip around and reveal their flaws with total ferocity. Nobody escapes- each of his characters is either malicious or stupid, and almost all of them are on the make. This is a novel which almost makes you ashamed to belong to the human race.
There’s more to it than that, though.
You see, I had started Among the Chatterati, by Kanika Gahlaut at about the same time as Vanity Fair. I took, only two hours to finish that, but let’s leave that aside for the moment.
Among the Chatterati is about India’s Page 3 People- the party animals who will go to amazing lengths to have their picture on the society pages of the newspapers. The humour is more obvious than in Vanity Fair, the narrator is sympathetic towards at least a few people, but as in Vanity Fair, everybody is on the make. In Vanity Fair, people use all their energies and influence to be presented at court, in Among the Chatterati they do the same to have their names and pictures on Page 3 the next day. Thackeray’s characters live in a state of perpetual luxury on very little money by simply not paying their bills, while Kanika Gahlaut touches upon fashion designers and maharajas who live in the style they are accustomed to by getting other people to pay all their bills. And, of course, in both books, everyone bitches about everybody else.
What’s the point, then?
The first is that Kanika Gahlaut missed out on the opportunity to write a masterpiece rather than a bestseller. Delhi in 2000 is similar enough to Regency London, and probably more complex, for her to have done a complete exploration rather than a minor incision.
Vanity Fair higher than Among the Chatterati, but I plug them both.
And the final point is that 21st century Delhi is like 18th century London. This is something so cool and wonderful that one of these days I’ll dedicate an entire post to it.
Till then, this is the end of this one.
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