The Fraud (2023)

Why this one?

Just new Zadie Smith, innit? Can’t go too far wrong.

Zadie Smith (1975- ; active 2000- ), was born in Willesden, London, UK to a Jamaican mother and an English father.  She was born Sadie Smith and changed her name to Zadie aged 14. When younger, she was actively interested in tap dancing and considered pursuing a career in musical theatre.  Music is another thread in her life - she made money as a jazz singer while studying at Cambridge University, and among her siblings are rapper & stand-up Doc Brown and rapper Luc Skyz. 

While studying English at Cambridge, she began focusing on writing and had several short stories published in an anthology of student writing called The Mays Anthology.  Off the back of these stories, she was offered a contract for her first novel, which created a buzz in the publishing world several years before its publication.  On publication, White Teeth (2000) was a critical and massive commercial success, and won several major awards as well as being shortlisted for the Women’s Prize. It was followed by 2002’s The Autograph Man (also shortlisted for the Women’s Prize) and then On Beauty, which marked Smith’s first Booker Prize shortlisting, as well as its victory in the Women’s Prize for Fiction at the third time of asking.  

She subsequently published two further novels, 2012’s excellent NW, set around her home district of Willesden in North-West London (also my home postcode for much of the last decade, so I’m maybe slightly biased!) and 2016’s Swing Time which focused on her youthful interest in dancing.  She has also published several short story collections, most recently Grand Union (2019), written a play - The Wife of Willesden (2021), and a collection of essays written during the Covid-19 pandemic - Intimations (2020). The Fraud is her first historical novel.

Thoughts, etc.

The Fraud is a historical novel set across the nineteenth century and focusing on two apparently disconnected real-world storylines. One is the story of the Tichbourne Claimant, one of the longest trials in British legal history in which a butcher in Wagga Wagga, Australia comes forward claiming to be the presumed-dead minor British aristocrat Sir Roger Tichbourne. The other is the story of forgotten British novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, who mixes with a literary milieu including the likes of Dickens and Thackeray, has early-career success with ‘scandalous’ novels, one of which outsells Oliver Twist, but by the bulk of the novel’s story has fallen on tougher times and is something of a critical laughing stock.

The lynchpin tying the two stories together is the novel’s real ‘main character’, one Eliza Touchet. Ainsworth’s cousin, in earlier years she had affairs with not only Ainsworth himself but his then wife (now deceased) Frances, and had a seat at the table in their days at Kensal Lodge (Smith’s NW London again!) hosting literature’s brightest minds. In the present-day section, she finds herself accompanying Ainsworth’s new, much younger, wife Sarah to the Tichbourne trial, the latter swept up in the fever of the thing and a wild supporter of the Claimant. While Eliza is in no way convinced by the supposed “Sir Roger”, a comically oversized creation who lacks physical resemblance to the real Tichbourne, has no recollection of supposed relatives and associates, and cannot speak a word of French - the real Sir Roger’s first language! - she does find herself drawn into the trial.

Central to her fascination is the presence throughout at the Claimant’s side of the old Jamaican Andrew Bogle, a former family servant who has no apparent motive for standing by the Claimant but is regarded, improbably, by the vast majority of observers as unimpeachably trustworthy. “Black Bogle” earns fame and celebration of his own, but Eliza is encouraged to dive deeper into his back-story, the detail of which (covering his family history as transported African slaves in Hope, Jamaica) we find in an excellent 100-page section in the middle of the novel.

There’s so much going on in this expansive and rich novel that it’s extremely difficult to know where to start. Its central concerns are somewhat comic, a transparently obvious ‘Fraud’ who nonetheless captivates a large proportion of the population with his charisma and appealing everyman appeal; and a hack novelist whose faith in his own ability is in inverse proportion to his talent. And yet behind all of this are some quite weighty themes - the mysterious and intriguing Bogle is given an extensive backstory detailing his family’s suffering as slaves, and his son’s explosive diatribe at Eliza towards the novel’s end is one of its highlights. There’s also a certain tragedy behind Ainsworth’s own story, one of a kind of maniacal delusion that creates an incredibly vulnerable ego.

And then we come on to Eliza, the central character and yet perhaps its greatest enigma. She’s both fervant Christian and sexually ‘deviant’ (for the times), passionate and loyal to Ainsworth yet privately despairing of him, scornful of novelists and the novel as a concept itself, and yet ultimately an emerging novelist herself. We get the sense throughout the book that there’s always more to know about Eliza, that we’re on the cusp of a ‘big reveal’ from her, but nothing quite so grand ever arrives. The one big ‘reveal’ is a secret revealed to her, not by. She’s a brilliantly humorous observer of all the madness around her, and in contrast to the passionate certainty of the other central characters (plus others - notably and brilliantly Dickens - who fall victim to her disdain) it’s perhaps her relative complexity and unknowability that sets her apart, and explains her fascination with the similarly enigmatic elder Bogle.

As if all of this isn’t already enough to chew on, it’s also evident that one of Smith’s greatest concerns in The Fraud is with the novel itself. Presumably purposeful situated at the height of the form’s impact on mainstream popular culture, the nineteenth century, it nonetheless - largely through Eliza’s voice - finds itself concerned with the role of the novel in general. This is something Smith has tackled elsewhere in non-fiction, tackling the question of whether the novel is a redundant form in the twenty-first century as well as touching on themes of who has the right to tell whose story. Both of these themes are very much present throughout the book, most interestingly seeing Ainsworth (relatively inconsequentially) and Dickens (more significantly) pinned as magpies or even vultures, interested in the plight of the underprivileged only insofar as they can exploit their stories for financial and critical gain.

There are no easy answers in The Fraud. Even its title is purposefully deceptive - while it seems to point to the Claimant, there are references to multiple other ‘frauds’ throughout the book and the suggestion that its many novelists are themselves the ultimate frauds. Yet the fact that Eliza turns to novel-writing herself in an attempt to make sense of both her own story and that of other rich and complex characters like Bogle points to a more complex conclusion - the novel may be deeply problematic, open to ridicule and incapable of real-world impact, but if it doesn’t offer solutions it at least offers solace, and therefore has to endure.

Score

9

A rich and complex read, with a lot to recommend it. Typically for Smith, it’s both laugh-out-loud funny and deeply thought provoking, asking many more questions than it could ever hope to answer (tellingly, there’s a chapter in there called Negative Capability, which feels fitting). Its only failing is perhaps that its ambition is so spectacular that it feels in some senses like a bit of a tease. Still, very much recommended and I wouldn’t be surprised if it gives Smith yet another Women’s Prize appearance, despite being overlooked by the Booker.

Next up

Back to the Women’s Prize read through, and getting close to up-to-date with 2021’s Piranesi.