An unbelievable bimbo's nine lives on the catwalk

WITH less than subtle undertones of Thackeray's Vanity Fair, this novel by Rachel Billington attempts to challenge our assumptions about characters and situations, about motive and judgment, about appearance and reality. Like Vanity Fair, too, its panoramic scope is delivered in episodes by a narrator with questionable authority. Were it not for the reductive and clearly tongue in cheek sub titles of the chapters, however, there would be good reason to fear that Billington is taking herself and her characters seriously.

In fairness, though, it is patently impossible to take a super model with the name of Sissy Slipper seriously. When, in the opening scene, Sissy Slipper slips (try saying that ten times in rapid succession when under the influence) on the catwalk, losing a tooth and provoking her mentor's fatal heart attack in the process, her character is firmly established: Sissy Slipper is a bimbo. With her "quasi anorexic history", her "swimming pool blue eyes"

(Vanity Fair's Becky Sharp's are green), her endless legs, and her pathetically impotent intelligence, she had been, until her "fall", the popular image of physical perfection. An American librarian, later in the novel, claims to have put Sissie's photograph on her refrigerator door "to keep [her] from eating", and Madame B., her erstwhile agent, claims her to have been a composite of all that is most beautiful and elegant and natural [sic] in the animal kingdom".

Due to her slip, her allegorical "fall", Sissie is banished from the fashion world (hardly an Eden) and travels the world over in pursuit of a new pearly tooth and the perfect hat for the woman she assumes to be her mother. She unwittingly falls victim to the lecherous dentist, Mr Plumb, to Howard Howard (whose clandestine profession necessitates his wearing wigs or stetson hats), and to a guru "Author" who insists that "A woman produces a novel from her womb, a man . . . with his head". As she clocks up her traveller's bonus miles, so too does she clock up the kilos. Her menstrual cycle resumes, she gradually acquires "an expanding roll of mountainous ... "FLESH!" and the prodigious proportions of her mammaries make Becky Sharp's seem deficient.

Impregnated in the Amazon by Howard Howard (who absconds with her pearly white in order to prevent her return to the catwalk), Sissy considers naming her child Amazonia. When Howard Howard feigns his own death, she predictably swoons and the attending doctor, with alarming alacrity, observes: "She's perfectly conscious or, rather, as conscious as she prefers to be."

At the end of the novel, and as a mother, Sissie returns to the catwalk in wolfskins and armour (is this paradise regained?) and, as Billington warns us, "too many Excitements happen for this or any other Author to deal with". In a flash, Sissie learns the truth of her parentage but is no more intellectually potent for the knowledge.

Throughout, various characters are caught reading none other than Magic and Fate. One of Sissie's exlovers and her intellectual equivalent says: "I could read it forever". Indeed, for many who are less intellectually challenged, the book may seem to take forever to read. It has outrageously funny bits but, if the "writer is an illusionist", the attempts to dupe the reader are feeble. While on the surface Magic and Fate may bear some resemblance to Vanity Fair, it ultimately lacks its substance and Thackeray's sardonic wit.