BookBrowse Reviews The Fraud by Zadie Smith

BookBrowse:

Zadie Smith's first historical novel is a prismatic, vastly intelligent, and sharply funny vision of social and political power dynamics in Victorian London.

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In a recent article for The New Yorker, Zadie Smith joked that she moved away from London, her childhood home and the primary subject of her work, because she didn't want to write a historical novel. "Any writer who lives in England for any length of time," she wrote, "will sooner or later find herself writing a historical novel, whether she wants to or not." I'm happy she caved to the pressure, though, because The Fraud is her most ambitious (and possibly best) work to date. The novel is anchored by the bizarre "Tichbourne Case" that gripped London in the 1870s, in which Arthur Orton, a butcher from Wapping, was put on trial for claiming to be Sir Roger Tichbourne, the long-presumed-dead heir of a vast fortune. But the trial is only a small aspect of the story. The plot spirals out far beyond the courtroom, grappling with class, gender, and racial politics from slave plantations in Jamaica to the salons of London's literary elite. With caustic wit, Smith deftly unravels the interplay between these various social forces, creating a vision of Victorian Britain that is as rich and multifarious as the era it's set in.

The first half of the book centers around the household of William Ainsworth, an aging historical fiction writer. Ainsworth was a real person, who in his younger days scaled the heights of literary success (his novel Jack Sheppard outsold Oliver Twist on release, a fact that the fictional Ainsworth clings to with an air of desperate pride). However, it's not Ainsworth who Smith focuses the narrative on, but his acid-tonged cousin, Eliza Touchet. A foil to Ainsworth's naivete, Eliza is shrewd, thoughtful, and analytical. A middle-aged widow with little prospect for an independent income, she is resigned to keeping Ainsworth's house and ministering to his floundering literary career, tasks which vastly underutilize her intelligence. When news reports of the "Tichbourne Trial" reach the Ainsworths' home, Eliza thinks it's ridiculous at first. But when she attends a trial hearing at the behest of Ainsworth's young wife, she finds herself increasingly fascinated by the key witness for the defense – Andrew Bogle, a Jamaican man who knew the real Roger Tichbourne as a child and swears that Orton is him. Determined to discover Bogle's motivations, she begins attending the hearings regularly, eventually forming a relationship with Bogle that challenges her understanding of herself.

A recurring theme in The Fraud is how being an outsider can give you a clearer perspective. Because Eliza is at a remove from the literary scene that surrounds her, she can often cut through the intellectual posturing that goes on amongst "great men." Her criticisms of Ainsworth's historical fiction reflect the pitfalls of the genre itself: excessive and unnecessary historical detail, melodramatic language, made-up slang. Her poor opinion of Ainsworth's work also appears to be borne out by history – his comically deluded self-importance is compounded by the fact that nowadays, few people outside of literature students remember him. But while Eliza is often contemptuous of her cousin, their relationship is complex and co-dependent. As much as she is frustrated by Ainsworth's irresponsibility and envious of his freedoms, she also enables him, shielding him from hard truths.

A dramatic shift occurs about halfway through the novel, when the setting moves from England to Jamaica. After Eliza befriends Bogle, the novel switches to his perspective, and we hear the story of his life. Bogle's experiences as a child are juxtaposed with the conversations in literary salons in the first section of the book – heated debates over the politics of abolition become frivolous abstractions compared to the reality of life on the plantation. Smith paints Jamaica as vividly and convincingly as she does London, and this section could almost be a novel in itself. As she charts Bogle's journey, she powerfully expresses the rage and sorrow he feels at the ignorance of the people around him, mirroring Eliza's feelings towards her male counterparts.

One of Smith's gifts is for creating complicated characters who don't know themselves as well as they think they do. The Fraud is a multifaceted book that resists easy analysis, but if there's one thing that ties it together, it might be the limits of self-awareness; even Eliza, more perceptive than most, has blind spots. This becomes apparent through her relationship with Bogle and his sons, when, suddenly, she is on the backfoot. Before this point, Eliza is the critical voice of the novel – she clearly sees the underlying motivations behind people's arguments and actions, and, with regard to the men in particular, the ignorance and biases that result from their privilege. But when we see Eliza through Bogle's eyes, she becomes the one who is ignorant of her privilege. What's more, in the same way that such flaws in the people around her were obvious to Eliza, hers are obvious to Bogle and his son. There are many overlapping power structures at play in The Fraud, and its characters are often unaware of their own position within them. But as always in Smith's work, there is no easy moral to the story – there are only people and the lives they inhabit.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in September 2023, and has been updated for the July 2024 edition. Click here to go to this issue.