Given the title of Zadie Smith’s new book, you’ll be unsurprised to find that The Fraud is about fraudulence. Yet in her typically elusive style, Smith never settles on an answer to the question of who the fraud is. In literary terms, she is surely among the possible list of candidates.
The most obvious seeming fraud is the cause célèbre of the 1860s and 1870s: the “Tichborne Claimant,” a mysterious man from Australia named Arthur Orton who purports to be Richard Tichborne. Tichborne, the heir to the Tichborne estate and title was lost at sea aged 25 and presumed dead. His mother, upon hearing that her son may have been spotted in Australia, placed extensive adverts in newspapers across the country pleading for information. One such advert was picked up by a butcher known as Thomas Castro in the sleepy inland farming town of Wagga Wagga in New South Wales. At some time in 1866, Thomas Castro arrives in London after raising enough funds claiming to be Tichborne. This man does not, however, speak French (Tichborne’s first language), is two hundred pounds heavier than Tichborne and it is not long before rumours start that this individual is actually Arthur Orton: a Wapping butcher’s son who had taken to sea as a boy and ended up in Australia. Curiously, his would-be mother accepted the new man instantly as her son even though other family members were not convinced. Eventually, Orton was found guilty and sentenced to 14 years for perjury.
The Tichborne case, among the longest and most famous trials in English legal history, provides the spine of the novel which is buttressed by two other narratives: the life and times of mediocre Victorian novelist, William Ainsworth, and the backstory of Andrew Bogle, the well-mannered former slave who becomes the star witness of the Tichborne trial.
The book opens on the novelist Ainsworth’s doorstep in 19th-century Tunbridge-Wells. A “filthy boy” – with experience doing skirting boards in Knightsbridge – has been called in by the respectable and handsome Eliza Touchet, occasional lover and cousin by marriage of Ainsworth, to fix a crater that has opened up on the second floor. The sheer weight of literature in Ainsworth’s abode has put a terrible strain on the house.
This scene ostensibly takes its cue from E.M Forster’s 1910 masterpiece Howard’s End, which as it happens, Smith’s 2005 novel, On Beauty, is a homage to. Forster’s working-class tragic hero Leonard Bast is crushed by a bookshelf in a middle-class home: he is killed by the bourgeois culture that he was desperately “groping after”. Much as Forster’s conceit examines the elitist enterprise of writing and collecting literature,the sagging weight of Ainsworth’s novels calls to scrutiny the function of the novel and the social position of the novelist.
Ainsworth is therefore another possible fraud. Used as Smith’s self-ironising symbol for the irrelevant writer, Ainsworth is self-absorbed, aware his best years are behind him, frustrated by Dickens’s success, and was far too busy at his desk to realise that his first wife was dying. His waning talent notwithstanding, Ainsworth is unable to stop partaking in that activity Smith called “indefensible”: writing fiction.
Through Eliza’s perspective, we observe that Ainsworth’s characters lack emotional depth, his descriptions are uncomfortably bad, and his plots do not connect. All of which, I regret to say, are criticisms that could be levelled against The Fraud itself.
The novel Ainsworth is working on is billed as his “Jamaican novel”. And yet, writes Smith, “only in the final pages did that island appear, buried under the weight of an entangling plot”.
The Fraud, in part Smith’s attempt to confront the legacy of slavery in Jamaica, technically has a triple-decker structure yet it is presented in eight “volumes” and delivered in short and disorientating vignettes. It’s nearly three hundred pages before we arrive in Jamaica; the sporadic movements between Bogle’s Jamaica and Eliza’s England, between the 1830s and the 1870s, between the height of literary dinners and the twilight of Ainsworth’s career, are not always easy to follow. Four people pass away in fifteen pages of Bogle’s narrative, and it’s hard enough to keep up with let alone shed a tear for the passing of minor characters: including Bogle’s wife and his newborn infants.
If Ainsworth is a self-reflexive punch-bag to display Smith’s own anxieties about novel writing, then perhaps her own struggles when writing this novel come through in her satirical criticisms of him.
Most disappointingly, The Fraud lacks the ideological delicacy, prose mastery, and ear for vernacular so characteristic of Smith’s arguably best novel, On Beauty. Working-class Sarah, utterly convinced of the true identity of the Tichborne Claimant, is presented as ridiculously dim-witted and gullible, and an attendee of a Tichborne rally is described as having “a simpleton’s face with a chin-strap”. While populism is depicted as little more than mass hysteria where “inconvenient facts are of no consequence” in an “ocean of feeling,” bourgeois Eliza, in her “freshly elevated position”, is able to “see far across the human sea.” All of which sits a little too smug and self-assured for a novelist as good and self-doubting as Smith.
If there is a redeeming feature of The Fraud, it is that Smith uses the Titchborne trial to take aim at both activists and populists on either side of the current culture war. Fortunately, through Eliza, we do get some insight into Smith’s middle-class anxieties about not understanding working-class populism. Yet, The Fraud is a little too sneering to be sensitive and, much like Ainsworth’s second-level floor in his Tunbridge-Wells house, it sags under a heavy load. This novel is a mile wide and an inch deep.
The Fraud, published by Hamish Hamilton, £20
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