The Fraud

06-09-2023

Zadie Smith

Hamish Hamilton (2023)

Review by Franklin Nelson

‘Any writer who lives in England for any length of time will sooner or later find herself writing a historical novel, whether she wants to or not’, wrote Zadie Smith in an essay published by The New Yorker in July 2023. To be sure, the winner of the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction, among other awards, has often used England – and London especially – as a setting. Yet, as Smith also noted, she quit her birth country soon after graduating from the University of Cambridge. ‘When friends asked why I’d left … I’d sometimes answer with a joke: Because I don’t want to write a historical novel.’

Smith’s observation on the inescapability of fiction concerned with the past for a writer tied to England is, in her case at least, now true. The publication in August 2023 of The Fraud marks her first foray into the genre, and her first novel in six years. Told across eight tightly constructed ‘volumes’ and executed with wit and flair, what a foray it is.

If history can be a burden for a young writer, The Fraud opens fittingly with an avalanche of the stuff. We are in the house of William Harrison Ainsworth, a contemporary and friend of Dickens, who is now largely unknown despite having published ‘forty-one novels, many of them wildly successful’ before his death in 1882, according to Smith’s afterword. A house where ‘the sheer weight of literature’ has caused the second floor to collapse. Seeing to the mess is Eliza Touchet, a no-nonsense Scot and Catholic who is Ainsworth’s housekeeper and cousin by marriage.

The eye through which much of the novel’s action is interpreted, we learn that Touchet left home in 1830 after being called to London to help Frances, William’s first wife, care for their three young children, when he had departed suddenly for Italy because ‘he is almost 25 and must see beauty’. Despite Touchet vowing to go home within a month, the two women stay together for nine and become more than friends. William’s return stymies that relationship and sees Touchet retreat into ‘the silence of herself’, although she and William soon start an affair. Frances dies not long afterwards, but if she does not leave behind a lover, she does leave behind a sister in a growing crusade: the abolitionist movement.

Years later, William is newly married to his former maid Sarah, and the country is gripped by one man’s claim in the courts to be the rightful inheritor of a prominent baronetcy – a legal cause célèbre that captivated Victorian England in the 1860s and 70s. Surprisingly, the man who says he is Sir Roger Tichborne calls as his key witness a freed Jamaican slave, Andrew Bogle. Sarah, convinced of the man’s legitimacy, follows the trial closely, attending several hearings with Touchet, who takes notes in court and comes to sympathise with Bogle. After the claimant is judged to be a fraud and his case thrown out, Touchet invites the elderly Jamaican to tell his story over pork chops, setting in motion a chain of events and a key plot line.

Born into enslavement after his father was abducted and trafficked across the Atlantic, Bogle witnessed beatings and brandings but later secured a patron and found his way to England via Australia. Chiefly, but not solely through his testimony, Smith puts the historical novel to good use. She underlines that Britain and the Caribbean were, and remain, ‘profoundly intertwined’, while readers are left in no doubt about the people, goods, practices and systems that underpinned life as lived in 19th century fiction but went largely unaccounted for within its pages. That Touchet, by the novel’s end, has prepared a book, also entitled The Fraud, suggests the Scot wants her own future readers to understand similar truths.

‘Am I the right person to write a book about a load of white people in Victorian England? What qualifies me exactly? Literally nothing’, Smith told Vogue magazine in September 2023. Her remarks speak in part to live debates about the ethical and political implications of writing about lives that are not one’s own. Ainsworth, Touchet, Bogle, Frances, Dickens – all these characters and more existed, and Smith’s reimagining of their experiences and inner lives is fair and compelling.

Stunning in its detail and warm in the telling, The Fraud blends registers of tragedy, comedy and the everyday – folding fact into fiction – to probe the stakes involved in personal and collective debts and inheritances. In that sense, it feels just the right kind of historical novel for 2023, and well worth the wait.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/308246/the-fraud-by-smith-zadie/9780241336991