The Fraud review: Zadie Smith’s first foray into historical fiction is both splendidly modern and authentically old

“One of the complications of managing decline was nostalgia,” writes Zadie Smith in her latest novel, The Fraud. Set in Victorian times, the book is her first foray into historical fiction – but it also has so much to say about our present disintegrating little island and its obsession with sentimental reminiscence.

The Fraud is a complex mosaic of interweaving plots, set around the “Tichborne Claimant” battle, a legal cause célèbre in the 1870s and a case Smith says she has been thinking about for more than a decade. The trial of a man claiming to be Sir Roger Tichborne, heir to a fortune who was thought lost at sea, lasted 140 days and consumed the attention of the public. Was he really a baronet or just an imposter, a butcher from Wapping?

The reader sees the trial through the eyes of widowed Scottish housekeeper Eliza Touchet, who is living with her cousin William Harrison Ainsworth, a once famous writer who is now in a permanent professional slump, churning out tedious, unreadable historical fiction. Smith captures his personal decline in one brutal passage, describing how a “handsome young buck” of the 1830s has turned into “this whiskery, jowly, dejected, old man”.

In her portrayal of a bustling Victorian household – Eliza has a secret love affair with Ainsworth’s wife and generally serves as a muse to the eccentric writer and advice-giver to his daughters – Smith creates a compelling picture, fulfilling her aim of rescuing the past “from this flat view we have of it”.

Ainsworth, author of 41 archaic clichéd novels, is a benignly ludicrous man and Eliza’s erratic relationship with him is deftly observed. Smith also pokes fun at the absurdities of other revered Victorian writers. The Fraud also has a notably spiky portrayal of Ainsworth’s friend, Charles Dickens, presented here as a self-satisfied, obsequious man, always playing a part and “two-faced” in his dealings with friends.

Smith, who has previously written everything from essays and short stories to playscripts, and whose enthralling, intricate, multi-plotted novels include White Teeth, NW and the Orange Prize-winning On Beauty, admitted she started out intending to write a “comic” historical novel. However, post-Trump, post-Brexit, it developed into one that was, in her words, “more like life: comic and tragic”. The brilliantly witty and melancholy two-page chapter ‘The Brighton Years, 1853-67’ is a sublime example of her ability to bridge both emotions.

The Tichborne drama allows Smith to explore deep and resonating themes of class, race and money. The prime witness in the trial was Jamaican-born Andrew Bogle, and some of his eloquent testimony appears in the novel. Eliza is sufficiently intrigued by his past to take him to a London chophouse and beg to hear his life story. A fair portion of the 450-page story is an account of Bogle’s history, a mournful, sickening story of slavery, cruelty and racism. The complicity of the British public in supporting and perpetuating slavery is a question raised by the novel. There is a telling moment when Eliza endures her own experience of the “almost dizzying feeling of exclusion”.

Smith also brings to life how the Tichborne case turned into a comic carnival, as the line between courtroom and entertainment became paper thin. It’s clear from The Fraud that the importance of separating fact from fiction in life was something as easily missed by the Victorians, munching on their winkle-pots and paper cones of chestnuts as they sat in the courtroom gallery, as it is by the public in our own blinkered age.

I thoroughly enjoyed the way Smith casts such a curious eye on the past, along with her gift for capturing character and appearance. Animal references abound: men have badger faces, jowls like a bloodhound, long faces like a horse or they resemble toads and snakes. Self-delusion is everywhere in The Fraud and Eliza ends up concluding that “people lie to themselves all the time”. Through Tichborne (or is he just London-born conman Arthur Orton?) we see how easily someone dangerous can win huge public support by presenting himself as a paradox. For Trump and his baseball cap-wearing supporters, substitute the people who bought Tichborne Toby jugs. The “fraud” in Smith’s novel is evident in both the characters and in England itself, sucking on the fantasies of its past. “People turn out to be extraordinarily suggestible, with brains like sieves through which the truth falls,” says Eliza.

True Londoners tend to remain attached to the old districts in which they were born (or grew up) and you can tell that writing about her native city and its past is intensely meaningful for Smith. She makes London a commanding presence in The Fraud, although a time when Edgware Road had fields as far as the eye could see and Kilburn was “pretty” seems a fanciful concept now.

The novel pulls off the trick of being both splendidly modern and authentically old, helped by melodramatic Dickens-style chapter headings such as “All is Lost!”. The characters, including pernicious lawyers, writers disfigured by egotism and milksop campaigners, are varied and entertaining and Smith, in the way of a Victorian stereoscope, ties together bountiful images, personalities and dramas into a single dazzling three-dimensional picture. The Fraud is the genuine article.

‘The Fraud’ by Zadie Smith is published by Hamish Hamilton on 7 September, £20