The Fraud — Zadie Smith’s tremendous take on the historical novel

It’s Zadie Smith, but not as we know her. Since her 2000 debut, White Teeth, Smith has achieved global acclaim as a fiction writer and essayist exploring the modern world, city life and identity. Fans will find much they recognise in her tremendous new novel, which tells the story of a novelist, his mistress and a controversial trial over a 50-year period.

The Fraud gives us William Ainsworth, a commercially successful writer overshadowed by his more talented friend, just as Smith’s 2005 novel On Beauty, a campus tale of intertwined families and feuding academics, gave us Howard Belsey, a conceited lecturer overshadowed by his rival, Monty Kipps. The novel’s protagonist, Ainsworth’s cousin and mistress Eliza Touchet, is uncertain of her place in a changing world, like so many of Smith’s characters. In Andrew Bogle, the star witness in the 125-day trial of “the Tichborne claimant”, there is a character who exists between at least two worlds, as many of Smith’s most memorable characters do.

And in all their lives, there is that well-observed blend of the effortlessly comic and the painfully tragic that has been present in all Smith’s work.

There is one important difference: Ainsworth, Touchet, Bogle and the Tichborne trial were all real. Ainsworth was a prolific Victorian writer of historical fiction, a friend to Charles Dickens, who matched his friend sale-for-sale at times but is now essentially forgotten. Touchet, who served as his hostess during his separation from his wife, once owned an autographed copy of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which became the most expensive of Dickens’ books when it was sold at auction in 2009.

The Fraud is Smith’s first historical novel, taking as its inspiration a trial that commanded public attention and provoked riots in the street: that of Arthur Orton aka Roger Tichborne aka Thomas Castro — a butcher who travelled from Australia to claim that he was the rightful heir to the Tichborne baronetcy — which ended in Orton’s imprisonment for 14 years in 1874. But Smith’s story goes well beyond one trial: it stretches way back to the beginning of the 19th century, and its geographic span ranges from Africa to Jamaica to the UK. The third-person narrative effortlessly shifts back and forward in time.

Although the characters are real, their inner life is what gives the book its power, and is almost entirely her own invention

There are moments when these real-life characters feel almost too delightfully Smithian to be believable. Can there really have been a writer friend of Charles Dickens who found fame before him and was eventually supplanted by him, with Dickens emerging “seven years younger, seven times the richer, and in possession of a reputation that had often appeared, to William, to stretch seven continents”? (The answer is yes — but I would advise any reader with a desire to know more about Ainsworth’s work to take Smith’s word for it, rather than subject themselves to him as I did.)

Can the prime witness in the Tichborne claimant really have been a freed slave by the name of Andrew Bogle, escorted by his mixed-race son? (Yes.) And surely these people can’t really have lived in Kilburn, the London neighbourhood where Smith grew up and a recurrent location in her work? (They really did.)

You can almost see why Smith, who used to joke that she had moved 3,500 miles from her hometown to New York to avoid writing a historical novel, felt she couldn’t get out of writing The Fraud. As she writes in the Waterstones special edition of the novel, she felt that “the book was hardly mine at all, and I’d only been dragged in at the last minute to write it — to do the grunt work”. But Smith is being too modest — although the characters are real, their inner life is what gives the book its power, and is almost entirely her own invention.

When I started reading The Fraud, I had not yet freed myself from what Smith describes in the New Yorker as the “specious logic” that once made her so iffy about writing a historical novel, a prejudice that prompts the question: “If you pick up a novel and find that it could have been written at any time in the past hundred years, well, then, that novel is not quite doing its self-described job, is it?”

But The Fraud’s trump card isn’t that, on this occasion, the past has thrown up characters who could have sprung entirely from Smith’s imagination. As both the haunting passages about Bogle’s life as a slave and the sections about the beginning and end of Touchet and Ainsworth’s romantic entanglements demonstrate, in different ways, the past is always closer, and more influential, than you think.

After a while, you realise that The Fraud isn’t Smith’s first historical novel. It is her first prequel: a book that provides the pre-history of both the world and the neighbourhood that she first brought to life in White Teeth with a divorced war veteran trying, unsuccessfully, to gas himself opposite an Indian restaurant on New Year’s Eve in 1975. Just like White Teeth, The Fraud is a novel that illuminates what it is to live and to love in the 21st century.

The Fraud by Zadie Smith, Hamish Hamilton £20/Penguin $29, 464 pages

Stephen Bush is an FT columnist and associate editor

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