Awuor Onguru
The Fraud by Zadie Smith, Penguin Random House, 477 pages, $29
Zadie Smith’s England is intimately familiar, even in its past tense. In what is considered her first “deeply historical” novel, Smith’s country still evokes a feeling of belonging through the eyes of four unlikely ambassadors: a disillusioned housekeeper, a disgraced and culturally appropriative writer, an ostentatious fraudster, and a former slave. This is not Smith’s first attempt at Dickensian breadth in her novel. She is best known for the winding, decades-long sagas of White Teeth and Swing Time. However, Smith has been explicit about her urge to emulate and reference Dickens in The Fraud, writing in The New Yorker: “To be my age, bookish, and born in England was to grow up under that tiresomely gigantic influence.” For Smith, this is the first time that her fiction takes root in an established historical universe, and perhaps one of the most historically established periods of British history: Victorian England.
In The Fraud, Smith asks the central question of writers of historical novels: can gaps in the historical record be filled with fiction? And, as a corollary, can historical novels facilitate the transformation of national memory, and hence identity? By setting her novel in the 19th century, Smith tackles the murky underbelly of England’s colonial project. One of the central protagonists of the novel is himself a writer, albeit a failed one. William Ainsworth, once popular enough to outsell Dickens, is now falling into obscurity due to declining interest in his “ghastly and long” prose. Like Smith, Ainsworth is trying to make sense of his country through fiction, and like Smith, Ainsworth is turning his eye backwards in time to complete the task. Desperate to regain cultural relevance, Ainsworth begins to research and write a novel set in Jamaica, a proving ground for colonial policy—and a place he has never visited.
Ainsworth spends his days writing fiction, reveling in his former fame, and moving his family from house to house on unpredictable whims. His housekeeper, cousin, and sometimes lover Eliza Touchet is the enabler of his desires. Yet she is not afraid to have opinions of her own about Ainsworth’s writing, his position in society’s upper class (well earned?), and the debate about slavery in the colonies, which William is determined to appropriate as a compelling plot device and pathway back to fame. That Ainsworth chooses Jamaica is particularly significant: that is where Smith’s mother was born. His uncritical approach to the subject makes us wonder about Smith’s own endeavor to reconcile England’s whitewashed past with its history of colonization through fiction. Why do we turn to fiction to venerate ourselves? Smith responds via Ainsworth: because fiction gives us control over a world we cannot otherwise control. We can force it to give us the historical narrative we desperately need in the present, at the risk of changing the story altogether.
Eliza’s character is also inspired, perhaps, by Smith’s own desire to locate and understand the presence of women in discussions of societal culture. Eliza guides us through the (few) highs and (more frequent) lows of Ainsworth’s career, admitting to herself that she is more and more bored with his work as the days go by. Nonetheless, she works hard to maintain the façade of Ainsworth’s former glory: in one of many comical scenes in the novel, Touchet calls a young craftsman to their home to repair a large hole in the library. The hole was created when the sheer weight of Ainsworth’s publications caused the bookcases to descend through the floor below. As the young man turns the books in his hands, he asks Eliza: “So many books. What’s the need with them all?” Ainsworth wrote them, Eliza responds—but even she isn’t convinced of her answer. Stuck between the monotonous effort to coddle William and to be honest with herself about the quality of his work —and, more daringly, whether he is worthy of the life he lives—Eliza begins to reflect on her own fraud of identity. Eliza longs, really, for Ainsworth’s life but due to her own premonitions about her place as a woman, can only allow herself to feel these things in secret. “The several borders he had crossed and recrossed, unaccompanied, unencumbered, on a whim, whenever he wanted!...What interested her was his freedom of movement. His freedom.”
Amid Eliza’s doubts about her benefactor, Smith introduces the famous Tichborne case: a true story in which Roger Castro, a butcher from Australia, turns up in London claiming to be the long lost Baron Tichborne, laying claim to an incredible inheritance. Known as one of England’s longest running trials, Smith adapts this narrative to explore what truth and fiction can mean given the opportunity for personal gain, public or private. Upon landing in England, the false Tichborne enjoys wealth and notoriety beyond comparison. All the characters in the novel, major and minor, follow the case as it develops over the course of several years. Ainsworth, interestingly enough, has his head in the sands of Jamaica, oblivious to the story unfolding before him in real time. There are parallels between Tichborne’s and Ainsworth’s frauds: in search of fame, wealth, and personal fulfillment, they both choose to delude themselves and the public. Ainsworth is still convinced that his writing deserves relevancy, and is in denial about the viability of his newest storyline. Tichborne, a butcher from Australia, grasps at straws to bind himself to historical nobility. From their efforts, it is apparent that the approval offered to members of the nobility is plentiful, even when barely earned. Victorian England, like the modern Western world, is obsessed with the project of itself: demonstrating grandeur, prestige, and power on its home shores and across the globe. Colonization and its sister, capitalism, have created a peculiar set of relationships between the city of London and the colonies that lie beyond it, notably Jamaica and Australia. It is possible and even expected, as evidenced by our two fraudsters, to manipulate those corrupted connections further to one’s own end.
The Tichborne case is also a means to introduce a lesser known faction of Victorian English life: former slaves, now citizens and patrons of the metropole. In Smith’s narrative, their lives are at a turning point. The English public, increasingly self-conscious of colonialism’s crimes, has turned their eyes away from the bourgeoisie, seeking more unlikely heroes like Tichborne. Smith elaborates in The New Yorker: “The British Public—like its cousin, the American People—is full of surprises, and having seen so many working-class defendants mistreated by bourgeois juries, Etonian lawyers, and aristocratic judges, the people were more than ready to support a poor man’s claim to be a rich one.” His claim is supported by Andrew Bogle, a former servant of the Tichbornes, who in turn acquires great fame. Unlike Tichborne and Ainsworth, however, Bogle’s identity as a Black man prevents his public status from manifesting as personal wealth. Instead, he finds himself fetishised by well meaning, but performative English people, namely Eliza, who hunts him down and coerces him into relating his traumatic history. For the subaltern, their identity is only as stable as it is useful to a community that seeks affirmation through it. Bogle recounts his story to Eliza unflinchingly, honestly, without expectation of accolade or reward. Refusing to participate in the fraud culture, Bogle exposes how Eliza’s own identity is bound up in the colonial project, subsequently destabilizing it:
Who was [Eliza], really? Who were her people? The Ladies of Llangollen?....But then there had been, and always was, William. And now this queer feeling for Bogle. She had played the dominant Bloomer with Frances, the feminine muse for William, and perhaps, in some imagined utopia, she could be met on even, common ground with a clever soul like Bogle, who seemed to live as she had always wished to, that is, with no illusions. What would it be like to have a name for all these various people and urges within herself? But Mrs. Touchet was her name!…all of our names are only temporary, she reminded herself. Only notations for something beyond imagining. They can give shape to matters too big to be seen, but never can they wholly describe the mystery.
In a modern world ripe with sensationalism and contradictions, Smith’s historical fiction proves that there’s nothing new under the sun— not even crimes of identity. Erasing oneself to fit the status quo is normal, but the truth will hunt you down across time and space. The characters in The Fraud eventually must face themselves.
Smith’s story is about truth, as told by fiction. I found myself at every stage reflecting, in one way or another, on my own self presentation, and on the times when the fictions of the world have compelled me to act against my own convictions. In my own writing, I have been Ainsworth—abandoning the rich pastures of my personal world for a theme, a story or a character that might be easier to digest. Smith’s plethora of minor characters warns against this tendency, as I sometimes found myself wading through them for longer than I would have liked. Yet the novel always returns to itself—to Smith’s witty humor, brilliant description, and captivating image of England on the cusp of a new century. In many ways, England is in the same place that it was in the 19th century: stuck in a cycle of reinvention. As our communities reckon with what it means to be truthful and authentic, Smith’s fiction reminds us to think deeply about the stories we create for our historical, present, and future selves, and the consequences those stories have for the world around us.