The Fraud

The Fraud is Zadie Smith's 2023 sixth novel, the structural pivot from her contemporary North London literary territory (White Teeth, On Beauty, NW, Swing Time) into Victorian historical fiction. The structural premise is Eliza Touchet, the Scottish-born housekeeper and former lover of the once-prominent now-faded novelist William Ainsworth, becoming obsessed with the long-running Tichborne case — the 1860s-and-1870s English legal proceeding in which a working-class Australian butcher named Arthur Orton claimed to be Sir Roger Tichborne, the lost heir to the Tichborne baronetcy who had been presumed dead at sea in 1854. The novel cross-cuts the Touchet-and-Ainsworth domestic chapters in Bayswater and Kilburn with the courtroom-and-public-spectacle Tichborne case across the same months. Andrew Bogle, a former Tichborne family slave from Jamaica brought to England as a witness for the claimant, becomes the structural moral center of the novel through the chapters Smith gives him to narrate his own Jamaican-slavery-and-emancipation history.

Smith's structural method is the patient cross-cutting between the Touchet-and-Ainsworth Victorian-literary-social chapters, the courtroom and Tichborne-Trial-public-spectacle material, and the Bogle chapters that excavate the broader 1830s-Jamaican-slavery-and-Knibb-emancipation historical record. The novel reads in the patient Victorian-realist-and-essayistic register Smith has been refining across the broader catalog and that distinguishes The Fraud from the conventional Victorian-historical-fiction tradition. The Bogle chapters in the middle third are the structural emotional center of the novel and the part that delivers the broader contemporary argument the novel makes about how the operational mechanics of nineteenth-century British imperial extraction produced specific kinds of individual moral compromise in the literary-and-political class that the Touchet-and-Ainsworth domestic chapters illustrate. The novel's back-third reveal about the structural relationship between Touchet's obsession with the Tichborne case and her own under-acknowledged literary ambitions delivers the structural moral payoff the entire novel has been building toward.

Recommended as required contemporary British literary fiction reading, as the structural pivot in the Smith catalog, and for fans of White Teeth, On Beauty, and the broader Smith essay-and-fiction catalog. Compare to Wolf Hall (Hilary Mantel), Hamnet (Maggie O'Farrell), and contemporary British literary historical fiction. The Doc Brown / Karl Collins / Maya Saroya audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.