Award-winning British writer Zadie Smith’s latest novel, “The Fraud,” is about many people trying to get free. It pieces together a microcosmic picture of the problems and character of Victorian England, set against the backdrop of the infamous Tichborne claimant case. The trial, lasting over a year, dealt with butcher Arthur Orton’s claim that he was gentleman Roger Tichborne, heir to the wealthy family’s land and fortune. Tichborne had been presumed dead in a shipwreck off the coast of South America years earlier.
The key witness testimony came from a former enslaved man, Andrew Bogle, whose life story takes shape throughout the novel, demonstrating the horrific legacy of the slave trade in Jamaica.
Smith appeared in conversation with journalist Emiko Tamagawa at the Coolidge Corner Theatre on Sept. 17 as part of her paperback tour for “The Fraud,” organized by the nearby Brookline Booksmith. The line for the signing that followed took over the bookstore and wrapped around the corner outside. Readers brought their copies of “The Fraud” and other Smith favorites, like her debut novel “White Teeth,” for her to sign as they spoke and took photos.
The novel centers Eliza Touchet, a Scottish housekeeper and cousin by marriage to failing Victorian novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, a contemporary of Charles Dickens. Smith described Touchet’s “feminine frustration” with the world and her pre-determined place in it. The novel unfolded around her quiet rebellion through, of all things, writing her own novel about the Tichborne case as she witnessed it.
The people and places of the novel seemed to exist around Smith before she ever considered writing about them. She resides in North London, where most of the events of the novel happened historically. She also lives near the very graveyard where Ainsworth and Touchet are buried, as well as where Bogle passed away.
Smith shared that she thought it was “spooky” how close she had always been to people who would later appear in her work. Though she admittedly put off writing this work for years after she encountered the story of the trial, Smith began working in 2020, immersing herself in the history of the area in which she lived.
“The Fraud” aimed to “refresh the picture of what Victorians are perceived to be” as Smith told Tamagawa.
For example, her portrayal of Charles Dickens, one of the young writers Ainsworth knew and that Touchet debated in the book, as a very emotional and almost manic 20-something, is anything but the cloistered, well-mannered popular conception of him associated with the time—which Smith shared was not at all how he actually acted in real life.
“The Fraud” is a novel about novels and the people who write them. Smith spoke about her writing process, jokingly calling the novel an “amorphous nightmare” that grows and shapes itself, sometimes out of her control.
Smith could sympathize with Ainsworth, comparing writers to stand-up comedians rather than academics by saying “it’s not that you write a bad novel, bad novels happen to you.”
Smith also shared that reading has always been part of her process when writing, and the research she conducted for this project shed light on history as a process of small changes enacted by many different people, as she told Tamagawa.
She identified herself as first and foremost a contemporary writer and asserted the novel as “not a historical novel in the ‘proper’ sense,” as it has many parallels to today’s world. The story and its many layers provide a pointed lens to shed light on the problems of hypocrisy and populism in today’s world.
“Everybody’s lying to each other,” she said, speaking of then and of now.
Smith draws a clear parallel between the blind trust and mania of the English people toward the claimant being who he said he was and modern Trumpism. For example, when Claimant supporters are called “fools and fraudsters,” they rally—raising signs that say “proud to be fools and fraudsters.” The mindless cult-like energy of the Claimant’s supporters imply the unsavory side of today’s American politics—Victorian Era notwithstanding.
Smith discussed how she used the book to explore today’s prevalence of fraudsters, and how people will turn to scamming as a last resort. Using this event as a way to “think about the present through the past” as she stated, she saw frauds and scamming as evidence of a broken society, where people cannot make ends meet honestly, so they must cheat to stay afloat.
“The Fraud” is a hugely ambitious novel, full of simultaneous storylines and quick flashbacks that Smith expertly juggles within the narrative. With the parallels she draws from historical society to the modern era, Smith demonstrates how 1860s London may not be as far removed from our world as we might think.
