Early on in Zadie Smith’s exuberant new novel, Eliza Touchet – the housekeeper, cousin by marriage and sometime lover of the Victorian novelist William Ainsworth – wonders why fictional characters and events are often pale facsimiles of their real-life inspirations. Ainsworth, for instance, can’t help basing a minor character on Mrs Touchet every now and again – be it as a dark-haired “mystery woman” in his first book of stories (“She was not, perhaps, what many might call beautiful, but I never knew anyone who possessed so much the power of interesting at a first look”), or a certain Mrs Radcliffe in one of his late novels, “with her ‘rich black tresses’, decided opinions, Amazonian height and skill with a horsewhip”.
In his mid-60s, Ainsworth has churned out a novel partly set in Jamaica, 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”. Eliza finds this entire business of borrowing, and omitting, recognisable details from life rather stale: “From such worn cloth and stolen truth are novels made. More and more the whole practice wearied her, even to the point of disgust.” Years later, Eliza goes on to write a novel of her own – the theme is noticeably more contemporary than her cousin’s compulsive efforts.
Fans of Smith will pick up on the familiar laundry of her sensibility within the first few pages of The Fraud: the boisterous narrative intelligence; the ear for dialogue; the chronic absence of boring sentences. I’d wager that this is her funniest novel yet and the best lines are all at Ainsworth’s expense: “Even as an adolescent, William fatally overestimated the literary significance of weather.” Or this one, about his onanistic writing process: “He always appeared entirely satisfied with every line.”
In reality, Ainsworth was once hailed as “the English Victor Hugo”, and one of his novels even outsold Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Smith captures him in his dotage, after the money has dried up, forcing his family to change houses every few years. His novels, more than two dozen of them, have fallen out of print, and publishers aren’t too keen to “look over” his new manuscript. He has recently knocked up a maidservant from Stepney, Sarah – who happens to be a decade younger than Ainsworth’s three daughters from his first marriage – and it falls on Mrs Touchet to make arrangements for a hasty wedding at the local Anglican church. Ainsworth did indeed have a housekeeper named Eliza Touchet, who died around the time The Fraud begins, in 1869. Smith reimagines her as a late-in-life novelist, a Catholic, an abolitionist, an observer of the London literary scene in the 1830s, a chronicler of the discernible changes in English society through the 1870s – someone who both belongs and doesn’t belong to the establishment.
At the centre of the novel, however, is another bit of “stolen truth”: the Tichborne case, still among the longest trials in English legal history. Sometime in 1866, a cockney-speaking butcher in Australia claimed he was Sir Roger Tichborne, heir to the Tichborne baronetcy, presumed to be lost at sea years ago. The Claimant, as he came to be known, was 200 pounds heavier than Sir Roger, couldn’t speak a word of French (Tichborne’s first language as a child), and yet the fact that he became an icon for the working classes was a testament to not just the capitalistic turn of 19th-century Britain, but also its venal dependence on slavery, indentured labour and other forms of colonial exploitation. In the novel, Sarah, the new Mrs Ainsworth, is fervid in her belief in the Claimant’s upper-class antecedents. Accompanying her to the trial, Eliza is amused by her uncouth comments and begins to understand that the masses don’t see the butcher from Wagga Wagga as an impostor, but as someone deserving of a fair day in court. The Claimant’s staunchest witness is one Andrew Bogle, a servant of the Tichbornes, formerly enslaved in a Jamaican plantation. His family story – how the Bogles went from being “high-born men” in an African village to captive overseers in a sugar estate – unfolds over 100 pages midway through the novel.
Smith presents a coruscating picture of twin societies in flux, the ways in which 19th-century England and Jamaica were “two sides of the same problem, profoundly intertwined”, joined at the hip by Andrew Bogle’s “secret word”: slavery. But she is also devastatingly good on the lesser delusions, the ways in which we are consistently blind to our own privileges. We see Ainsworth raucously debate the abolition of slavery with Charles Dickens, William Thackeray and other prominent literary men in his Kensal Lodge drawing room, while Mrs Touchet quietly refills their glasses with port. For years, the young Ainsworth disappears abroad, apparently to do “research” in Rome, leaving the women – his first wife, Anne Frances, and Eliza – to take care of the household. Decades later, he can’t understand why Eliza likes Middlemarch: “No adventure, no drama, no murder… Is this all that these modern ladies’ novels are to be about? People?” How could he? He has spent much of his life avoiding people, passing off almost all his responsibilities to women.
The late Martin Amis once wrote about Middlemarch that it is a “novel without weaknesses”. You might say something similar about The Fraud, except perhaps Andrew Bogle occasionally feels a bit two-dimensional, too benevolent. The first time Eliza sees him in court, she thinks he has an “honest” face, and the reader has no subsequent reason to disagree with her assessment. He is the one simple soul in a story otherwise littered with complicated portraits. Every few pages I was struck by how light the novel feels, despite its length and epic themes. The short chapters glide tellingly between decades and scenes.
• The Fraud by Zadie Smith is published by Hamish Hamilton (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
