Book Review: The Fraud by Zadie Smith

Book review

Dec 6

Angela Harris writes about Zadie Smith’s new novel, The Fraud (Penguin, 2023)

Having grown up in Wagga Wagga, Australia, I looked forward to Zadie Smith’s The Fraud, as its titular fraud is the famous 1860s Tichbourne Case. As school children, we are told a version that I suspected was more urban legend than fact. Wagga (you can only call it this if you are from there) is small enough even today to feature The Hill, The Lake and The Main Street, even though each of these landmarks have been properly named as Willan’s Hill, Lake Albert and Baylis St. No one need call them that, though, as there are no others. The Tichbourne Case holds the same place in the local imagination as the legendary ‘5 o’clock wave’, which gullible visitors are told tumbles down the Murrumbidgee River in the early hours of the morning and absolutely must be experienced.

The version of the Tichbourne Case that I knew begins with a wealthy family in England, searching for their lost heir in Australia, believed to have escaped a shipwreck. (Smith, who grew up in Kilburn, lived near Tichbourne Park, and discovered their story whilst walking the cemetery during Covid lockdowns.) The local story went that the Wagga butcher – who was not only the image of the heir, but also recalled details from his former life with easy precision – stepped forward but was not believed. A trial took place in England to settle the matter of his identity but the butcher’s case failed because, unlike the Tichbourne heir, he could not speak French. Then, many years, later whilst delirious on his deathbed, the butcher spoke French fluently. As children we gasped and felt the injustice of this tragic ending with as much passion as the working-class characters of The Fraud at every turn of the case.

In Smith’s version, the Tichbourne Case is a spectacle that captures the country, offering delicious gossip and trashy good fun. Openly enjoyed by the working classes, who adopt Wagga’s butcher as their own, it is more covertly savoured by everyone else who consumes the newspaper updates with embarrassed relish. The protagonist, Eliza Touchet, is cast as a discerning woman who, through her cousin, the writer William Ainsworth, rubs shoulders with the present-day literati. This includes Charles Dickens, whom she dismisses as a literary trickster and brilliant self-promoter. Her boldly counter-cultural adjudication – whether true to some extent or not – offers the reader a thoroughly interesting character with whom to navigate late nineteenth-century London. Amusingly, Eliza is shocked to find that not only is she captivated by the Tichbourne trial, but also, that she frequently agrees with Ainsworth’s working-class wife, Sarah, in her bluntly direct analyses.

Not for the first time Mrs Touchet was struck by how much more passion may be aroused by phantom damages done to female ‘honour’ than by anything actually done to a woman herself. We are only ideas to them, she wrote, at the top of a page. But it was not in keeping with anything else she had written so far – she could not explain even to herself what she really meant by it. Frowning, she scratched it out.
Downstairs, Sarah’s analysis was, by contrast, plain-spoken and frustratingly accurate:
‘He only went and mentioned the unmentionable! Don’t he know that these gentlefolk find their babies in the cabbage patch? Oh, he’s in for it now. Now he’s lost the toffs and gained the mob! (p. 195)

I must admit that for the first third of the novel I was not sure whether Smith had sufficiently mastered the historical fiction genre. I read with interest, but also with the same sensation I often feel whilst role-playing with my five-year-old daughter; she is fully in her imaginative world, whilst I remain outside, keen but unable to become similarly swept away. Since The Fraud is partly a novel about writing I wondered, for a while, if this was a deliberate move by Smith. Was Smith eschewing Dickens’ literary razzle-dazzle to the point of literary ascetism? Eliza, perhaps ventriloquising Smith, distrusts Dickens because he ‘had done it like a master – like an actor. That was precisely what was so dangerous about him.’ (p. 209)

In one scene the characters gather at Ainsworth’s home and take turns to look at pictures suspended in a stereoscope. Eliza mocks them for their fascination but ‘when it was her turn to put her eyes to the strange machine Mrs Touchet lost her sense of humour. A view of Ceylon. A distant mountain.’ (p. 219) Even Eliza cannot resist the transportive magic of art. This opens questions in the novel about the dangers of art and artifice that echo something of Platonic suspicion that it misguides one away from reality. And yet, it becomes apparent that Smith does desire to dazzle her readers, whilst, at the same time, schooling them about the powers and limits of artifice.

Once Eliza meets the Tichbourne case’s star witness, Andrew Bogle, the novel takes imaginative flight. So, too, does Smith’s theorising about what a novel can and should do. Bogle, a Jamaican man, first an enslaved person on Hope Estate in Jamaica, and later a loyal servant to the Tichbourne family for several decades, retires with his family to Australia. It is there he meets with – as he believes – Roger Tichbourne and becomes part of the events of the case. Bogle’s back story is one of the most compelling sections of this novel as Smith’s interest in him radiates from the page. Smith conjures Bogle’s fierce intelligence and his creative skill for making sense of English culture. Bogle’s cultural, spiritual, and moral mores and values, learned on Hope Estate, are rendered with respect and flair. The interest and strangeness of each of these cultures is laid side-by-side on the page in defiance of British imperialism and its claims to superiority.

On a wet day in mid-October, knee to knee in a rented gig, they headed north, with Tichborne talking and Bogle listening. Eight hours, during which Bogle learned many things. He had always known a man could be high born and yet go unhonoured—his own father had suffered this fate—but had never imagined this might be the case for such a one as Mr Edward. Tichborne himself seemed amazed. How had a man from a family ‘as noble and ancient as my own’ come to be ‘working like a slave’—and for such a notorious spendthrift and fraud? The answer had something to do with being a Catholic—Bogle could not follow the logic of this very precisely—but something more to do with the old, frequently mentioned, problem of being the third-born son of seven. The Duke, by contrast, was the lucky firstborn of his clan. (p. 275)

Bogle is the moral centre of the Tichbourne Case and of this novel. The irrefutable fact that anchors his reputation for the British public, and for the reader, is his willingness to embrace poverty for the truth; Bogle relinquishes his Tichbourne pension of £50 a year to stand by the Wagga butcher’s claim as heir. Throughout the long legal battle Bogle’s testimony never changes and is full of wonderful one-liners. In the afterword, Smith praises Bogle: ‘We are lucky to have a little of Andrew Bogle’s narrative genius preserved in the newspaper transcriptions of the two Tichbourne trials. The small selection of them that I have reproduced are quoted verbatim.’ (p. 453) And yet Smith did not make Bogle the protagonist of her novel but reaches out to him from across the 160-year divide via Eliza’s narrative frame. Smith’s literary conceit is that Eliza, captivated by Bogle as she watches the trial, casts him as her literary muse as she dares to write The Fraud. This, from a woman who has previously declared to herself ‘God preserve me from novel-writing […] God preserve me from that tragic indulgence, that useless vanity, that blindness!’ (p. 357)

Attempting to navigate a literary path between her disgust with Dickens and her boredom with Ainsworth’s dull prose, Eliza shares her critical and creative journey. Artifice is a powerful but potentially dangerous tool, Smith seems to warn the reader via Eliza, instructing that it be used with strict integrity. This perhaps looks back to Smith’s novel On Beauty (2005) which took its title and theme partly from Harvard academic Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty (2000). Scarry’s slim, bold critical theory text stakes a claim for the aesthetic and political rehabilitation of ‘beauty’. It is not, she argues, mere distraction from more important issues, nor the handmaiden of privilege or a mask for political interests. Scarry points instead to beauty’s ability to saturate the perceiver with a capacious goodwill, a desire to recreate the beauty beheld, and a compulsion to protect beauty, even when inanimate, as though it were alive. Scarry upholds beauty, then, with all its powers to deceive and seduce, as also a route toward justice itself.

Literature’s kryptonite, Eliza contends, is not ‘beauty’ but ‘magnetism’. A combination of charisma and a ‘way with words’ that permits the Dickens and Bogles of this novel-world to shine. Whilst Eliza, despite ‘all her good intentions, her facility with language, her capacious imagination […] still struggle[s] to make herself understood.’ (p. 344) Without magnetism, Eliza, a mature woman, fades into the background of a room, unseen and unheard. As Eliza’s writerly skills develop Smith has fun with her, wryly commenting ‘Mrs Touchet was under the singular delusion – common at this stage of the process – that everything was connected.’ (p. 337) At the same time the Tichbourne Case becomes more ambiguous, more complex to Eliza’s formerly cynical eye: ‘A pulse of doubt ran through her mind. Wouldn’t a fraud be nervous? Wouldn’t a fraud make more of an effort to convince?’ (p. 343) By developing her writer’s eye and hand Eliza softens and develops greater complexity and humanity. Observing the trial, Eliza’s skepticism and occasional distaste at working-class culture becomes tempered by a growing sense of fellow-feeling.

It was Guildford Onslow and his walrus moustache who stepped forward:
‘Friends! Supporters! Make no mistake about the facts. If it were not for the working classes – which I call the noble part of the British public – our Sir Roger would still be in gaol!’
A great cheer met this ‘statement of fact’. But was it true? From her freshly elevated position Mrs Touchet could see far across the human sea. Flat-capped men and poorly dressed women were certainly not hard to make out, forming little groups […]
Even to the unsentimental Mrs Touchett there was something inspiring and moving in the idea of all those earnestly collected pennies and donated subscriptions. A snatch of Shelley came to mind: Ye are many, they are few…
If only Onslow were a poet! But he was a country squire and spoke like one, arguing his case persuasively but without beauty. How could it be right that all the money and power of the state should once again be levied against this poor man without a penny in his pocket? (pp. 342-2)

As a woman, Eliza perceives Bogle’s racial heritage as similarly casting him outside white, patriarchal Britain. During a conversation she ‘thought she did understand him. His methods were, by necessity, obscure and underhand. They were like her own.’ (p. 438) She recognises that without the privilege to speak directly and plainly, both have developed wit, comic timing, euphemism and other such devices to say what they cannot otherwise say. Smith does not permit Eliza to take this claim to fellowship too far. After all, the first third of the novel has her sparring with Dickens at literary gatherings in a way unimaginable for Bogle. In a great, final scene, Bogle’s son, Henry, takes Eliza to task for her presumption.

Thrillingly, Smith sets protagonist and muse to fight. It is a discussion that I long to hear in a public forum today, where identity politics might be thoroughly debated rather than used as a tool for cancellation, prematurely arresting any real exploration of the issues at hand. Smith deals with each character as full of wisdom but necessarily limited; they need one another’s perspectives. The fight begins when Eliza tells Henry about the 1875 protest at Hackney Downs where she took part in tearing down fences in defiance of Lord William Tyssen-Amherst’s claim to own these. No man, she declares, owns the common land, the people’s land. Henry, in exasperation, with empty cupboards and the moans of his dying father drowned out by Eliza’s zeal, explodes. Where Eliza speaks in pragmatic terms about freedom as a political privilege that must be fought for, Henry reframes freedom as a universal right that England denies him.

He suddenly lost all worldly patience with her:
‘Why do you think it within your power?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Where does it come from? This power? To bestow freedom? Every Englishman I meet seems to think he has it.’
Mrs Touchet was astonished.
‘But I am quite lacking in that quantity, Henry. I have no power. I also beg you to remember I am a Scot – and a woman! However: I am a Briton, as you are yourself. The power invested in Parliament surely concerns us both…’
‘Parliament hands down the laws that govern us, yes. It cannot bestow freedom itself.’
Mrs Touchet was confused […]
‘Mrs Touchet, my freedom is as fully my inheritance as it is any man’s. It has not time, I need not wait for it, it was mine from the moment of my birth. Does it surprise you to hear me say so?’ (p. 441)

The true fraud of The Fraud is revealed as Henry exclaims: ‘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.’ (p. 443) Smith thereby recasts the fraud of The Fraud far away from the Dickensian-like razzle-dazzle of the Tichbourne Court case to focus on the larger fraud hiding in plain sight.

Did Wagga’s butcher speak French on his deathbed after all? Smith’s clever, thought-provoking novel makes you no longer care.

Angela Harris
Lecturer, Literature Cambridge
London