This is by Zadie Smith, and it was published in 2023. Towards the end of that year, it became one of those books that thrust themselves on your consciousness simply by being everywhere. There were two articles in The Conversation, for example. Another in the Economist. And then AudioFile recommended the audio-version, which is read by the author herself. (She's very good with accents, and it was an enjoyable listen. But it's not a book that totally lends itself to the aural format... The frequent time changes keep you on your toes -- we move backwards and forwards within a period that starts in the 1830s and closes in the 1870s -- and the mass of very short sections makes for a slightly choppy experience.)

There are three interlocking strands: The 19th-century literary scene (all port and gentlemen); the practice of slavery (which blemishes and poisons the British body politic like a pus-laden ulcer); and the nature of fraud (hydra-headed). The novel's main strength (aside from its sheer entertainment value) is the exceptionally clever way in which these threads feed into, and feed off, each other.

The base from which we keep travelling out is the family of author William Harrison Ainsworth (1805-82). The only thing I've read of his (I think while I was back in high school) is Old Saint Pauls, which I remember enjoying. But Ainsworth has not stood the test of time, and even while he was alive, he found his popularity waning drastically.

The eyes through which we see this 19th-century world are those of Eliza Touchet (pronounced a la francaise). She's the widowed cousin-by-marriage of Ainsworth, and at various points in the narrative, she is his lover, his wife Frances's lover, and after the death of Frances, William's housekeeper and the hostess of his literary gatherings (when there is sufficient money to do any hosting). She makes a good guide. She's Scottish, and acerbic, and intelligent, and she has no illusions about the quality of much of Ainsworth's work (namely, turgid, melodramatic, and utterly detached from reality -- we're even given an example in one of the chapters), or about the emotional maturity of the literary circle that he gathers about him. We meet, inter alia, Charles Dickens (despite her best attempts, Smith was unable to keep him out), and William M. Thackeray, and illustrator George Cruikshank, and critic and Dickens-biographer John Forster. We're not surprised to hear that underneath the bonhomie and bons mots, there's plenty of jealousy and back-stabbing (not to mention ingrained sexism and racism).

The second Mrs Ainsworth (Sarah, an illiterate young maidservant whom William has accidentally made pregnant) becomes an avid follower of the Tichborne trials (an extraordinary real-life case in which an apparently working-class and uneducated butcher claims to be Sir Roger Tichborne -- previously thought lost at sea -- and therefore heir to the Tichborne estate). Mrs Touchet has been introduced to the anti-slavery cause by Frances, and when she is dragooned into accompanying Sarah to the trials, the figure that most interests her is that of Jamaica-born Andrew Bogle, who grew up as a slave, but eventually became a servant of Sir Roger's uncle, and now insists that "the Claimant", as the butcher is known throughout the trial, is who he says he is.


Liverpool, 2018. The International Slavery Museum

Which brings us to the novel's third thread... Its title is The Fraud. But whom, exactly, is that epithet referring to? Is it Arthur Orton, born in Wapping in 1834 (as "the Claimant" is revealed to be)? Two trials pronounced him an impostor, after all, and sent him to jail.

Or is it Andrew Bogle, who surely must know that his calm, measured testimony (which is received by the public astonishingly well, given the prejudices of the day) is incorrect? Bogle is an intelligent man. Is this his attempt to expose and punish a fraud that sits right at the heart of British society? Or is this course of action just a matter of survival?

And what about Mrs Touchet herself? She's been sexually quite adventurous, while presenting herself as a prim housekeeper and a good churchgoer. She supports abolition, while living on an allowance that exists only because her late husband's family made their fortune in the slave trade. Is any of that fraudulent? Henry, Andrew Bogle's son, certainly seems to think it is... Incandescent about the denial of his rights, he tells her: "It is not the prisoner’s right to open his cell that is in question, Mrs Touchet! It is the gaoler’s fraud in claiming to hold a man prisoner in the first place. The first is self-evident. The second wholly criminal."


Bin Jelmood House, Msheireb Museums, Doha, 2018

And then there's William: "In his mid-60s, Ainsworth has churned out a novel partly set in Jamaica, [entitled] Hilary St Ives, though he’d never once visited the island. Mrs Touchet can trace back the gist of his knowledge about Jamaica to a propaganda booklet of the 1820s, when much of England could delude themselves into thinking that the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in 1808 was tantamount to the freedom of enslaved populations in British colonies. Ainsworth ignored the regular reports of tragic rebellions and vengeful colonial reprisals coming out of the Caribbean in the decades since to paint a prelapsarian portrait of 'long savannahs fringed with groves of cocoa-trees'."



And let's not forget the "fraud" that is embedded in the whole business of novel-writing. Mrs Touchet is revolted by this institutionalized habit of borrowing and omitting and twisting details from real life: "From such worn cloth and stolen truth are novels made. More and more the whole practice wearied her, even to the point of disgust." At another point, she thinks to herself: "God preserve me from novel-writing... God preserve me from that tragic indulgence, that useless vanity, that blindness!" And yet, she goes on to write a novel: The one we're reading, in fact (which is why it's divided into eight "volumes", in the manner of a 19th-century serialization, and has chapter titles reminiscent of the era).

We might not wholly trust Eliza's (anachronistic) pen, but at least she dishes up no complacent pseudo-certainties. The book is peppered with reflections such as "people lie to themselves all the time", and "so much of life is delusion", not to mention that eternal question, which she addresses to herself: "Who was she, really?"

In short, as Corbin K. Barthold puts it, "fraud pervades the tale... Marriages. Manners. Honor. The Stuart pretenders [one of Ainsworth's favourite subjects]. Buildings with classical facades. The nation of England. Bogle’s look of contentment, as he serves his masters. All fake. The effect is one of heavy uncertainty. What is fraud? What is truth? What’s the difference?"



Closely connected to these questions is the uproarious mass response to the two trials. Bickle describes this very well: "Smith conjures a carnivalesque mob of supporters around the Claimant who are devoted to a collection of causes: reform, working-class rights, freedom, anti-slavery and the strangely topical 'No Vaccine For The Poor Man’s Child' [that really was a thing, it seems]. In this way she recreates the sideshow atmosphere of excitement and mania that gripped Britain and can still be seen in the illustrated newspapers of the time."

And, of course, you can't help but think of the populism of today's times. Figures who are blatantly and demonstrably impostors gain powerful support from constituencies that they do not naturally represent, simply by tapping into a pre-existing groundswell of discontent that no-one else seems to be taking any notice of.

The Fraud seems to have divided critics somewhat. For Chakraborty it is "almost flawless"; for Iglesias, "the big flaw ... is its length" (I disagree); while for Sorensen, it's a "tangle of stunts and ruses", which has insufficient substance.

I liked it. I liked the complexity. There were just two things I wasn't sure about, in an otherwise very sure-footed novel. The first was the long monologue. (At one point Mrs Touchet waylays Bogle after one of the court sessions, invites him to a chop house, and -- posing as a journalist, which constitutes another fraud -- persuades him to tell her the truly awful story of his life in a slave colony.) I could see why it was there, roughly half-way through the book, and why it needed to take up so many pages, and why its account of the systematic breaking of bodies and mindswith needed to be bleak and unsparing. The rest of the British public could avert their gaze from their country's complicity in evil, but Mrs Touchet, for one, was going to stare the uncircumventable truth right in the face. I see the point, but I'm not a fan of presenting material in this way. My second reservation had to do with the introduction of the two illegitimate biracial girls that an ancestor of Mrs Touchet's husband's has left unprovided for. Their appearance, towards the end, and her decision to sign over part of her allowance to support them, had a slight whiff of contrivance.

Otherwise, this was riveting stuff. My first Zadie Smith won't be my last.


It was everywhere... This is the bit of Peel, Isle of Man, that still gives away its slave-trade connections