“Wouldn’t a fraud be nervous? Wouldn’t a fraud make more of an effort to convince?” Zadie Smith has gone big with her first historical novel, a 500-page saga centred on a real-life cause célèbre of Victorian England. The Tichborne trial of 1873, which ran for 188 days, investigated claims made by an English butcher living in Australia that he was Sir Roger Tichborne, the missing heir to a baronetcy and significant fortune back home. Whether the claimant was the aristocratic Sir Richard or a man from a working-class family in Wapping, split opinion and galvanised a nation, with the case becoming a microcosm of a wider societal battle between rich and poor in the England of the day.
This is interesting space for a fiction writer: issue-driven material with clear opposing sides, conflict, the whiff of scandal. As Smith’s narrator, Eliza Touchet, notes: “It had everything: toffs, Catholics, money, sex, mistaken identity, an inheritance, High Court Judges, snobbery, exotic locations.” Eliza’s tone here, and for the book as a whole, is drily ironic, a woman whose early (real life) misfortunes sharpened her senses and led her to coolly observe the world around her.
A cousin of the writer William Harrison Ainsworth, Eliza’s position is notionally that of housekeeper to William and his second wife Sarah, but we learn early in the narrative that Eliza’s influence over William lies beyond the domestic realm. Sarah is a memorable character in her own right – working class, savvy, opinionated, full of bluster. Some of the funniest parts of the novel concern her obsession with the Tichborne case. Her belief that the claimant is telling the truth, a cause of mirth and embarrassment in the Ainsworth household, acts as a catalyst for Eliza’s interest in the trial. From there the book expands, as with Smith’s contemporary novels, into a multifaceted, ambitious story brimming with ideas and insights.
With a nod to the Victorian era, The Fraud is separated into eight volumes of short, titled sections, covering topics as diverse as slavery, abolitionism, class, identity, marriage, infidelity, lesbian love, ageing, literary egos and rivalries. Frauds are everywhere, not just in court. Through William and his contemporaries (Dickens and Forster are particularly well drawn – the former’s opinions on “feminine public oration”, the latter’s foghorn voice), Smith riffs on the mercenary nature of writers, always on the lookout for the next story, always on the hunt: “From such worn cloth and stolen truth are novels made. More and more the whole practice wearied her, even to the point of disgust.”
To an older Eliza, later in the book, these feelings are tinged with nostalgia: “Now those dinners of the ‘30s looked golden to her, and all the annoying young literary men transformed into people she felt almost lucky to have known – Dickens notwithstanding.” That “almost” is classic Smith, the barbed compliment, the acuity that gives her novels such depth.
Throughout The Fraud, a defiantly non-linear timeline swings back and forth between past and present in a way that brings chaotic energy to the first half of the book but somewhat affects momentum in the final quarter when the reader might prefer to stay with the current action. The quality of the individual scenes is never in doubt though. There is a palpable vibrancy to the various backdrops of courtrooms, literary salons, secret trysts.
Historical details are deftly incorporated: clothes, mannerisms, settings, newspaper articles, charged-with-reality transcripts from court. These transcripts give the testimony of the defence star witness, a black man known as Andrew Bogle, who grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation in Jamaica and was brought to England by the Tichbornes. A lengthy inset narrative of his life story is brilliantly done, the many horrors, indignities and injustices documented in prose that is terse, factual and superbly effective.
Reporting a change of owners on the plantation, we’re told: “From then on, all children and new arrivals to Hope had MC burned into their shoulders, instead of RE.” In England, meanwhile, the many dramas of the warring, wealthy Tichbornes elicit in Bogle a familiar response: “He was so tired. He just nodded.”
Occurring at the midway point of the narrative, Bogle’s story gives the book its heart, and it also accounts for what Eliza calls “a common paradox of feeling” seen throughout the years of the Tichborne trial, namely that “it was possible to ‘know’ Sir Roger was a fraud and yet still ‘believe’ Bogle”. Great stories often contain great paradoxes, but it takes a writer of Smith’s calibre to lean into the murk and come up with gold. The Fraud is unlike anything you’ll read this year: a charismatic, cerebral novel that asks us to consider the greatest fraud of all, that of one man claiming to hold the key to another’s freedom.
