Smith’s post-Trump,post-Brexit,post-Queen retelling gives us a tale of a credulous populism,exalted buffoons and the bloody machinery of empire. (“England was not a real place at all,” she writes. “England was an elaborate alibi.”) But above all,The Fraud is study of truths and the people who concoct them:liars,lovers,lawyers and – worst of all – novelists.
Mrs Eliza Touchet – pronounced touché,a punchline in waiting – has spent her decades-long widowhood as housekeeper,literary cheerleader and occasional domme to her feckless cousin,William Harrison Ainsworth. Once a darling of the London literary circuit – a rival to Mr Dickens – William’s prose has strayed “beyond the reach of editorial intervention”. The heady days of light bondage and hefty royalty cheques are over,and Eliza now splits her time between patching a crumbling house and her cousin’s threadbare ego.
The Tichborne case offers Eliza an unexpected diversion. William’s new wife is swept up in the grand melodrama,and needs a courtroom chaperone. In the viewing gallery – amid the jostling zealots and sceptics – Eliza is captivated by the calm,sober testimony of Andrew Bogle,the Aussie butcher’s star witness. A former servant of the Tichborne family,Bogle was born to enslaved parents on a Jamaican sugar plantation. As the court considers one kind of inheritance,another stands in the witness box.
A quiet abolitionist (the least helpful kind),Eliza entreats Bogle to share his story with her. As she listens,something opens in her. Long stuck on the literary periphery,Eliza begins to imagine writing her own book. Is this compassion or ambition stirring? Does Eliza know the difference? Do we? Bogle’s story appears unbroken in the middle ofThe Fraud – a book within a book. But whose version is it? Does it matter?
The Fraud is a critique,defence and object lesson in artistic thievery all at once. It’s a sly facsimile of a Victorian novel that widens the aperture so we see what those books so assiduously left out. The invisible women “endlessly refilling the port bottles”;the “Carib boys in livery at the threshold of fine houses,got up like Princes of Arabia”;the white-gloved gentlemen who argue for abolition at dinner parties,but live off their granddaddy’s sugar money.
And the writers – the obsequious,vampiric,backstabbing,petty-hearted writers – penning exotic tales of places they never intend to see.
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What mighty fun Smith is having,especially with William Ainsworth,a man so reliably tedious that Eliza gags him for practical rather than erotic reasons (it’s the only way she can stop him recounting the plots of his novels). And having been relentlessly – often lazily – compared to Dickens for most of her career,Smith conjures him here and then kills him off. You can almost hear her snickering.
And that,perhaps,is the fatal flaw ofThe Fraud:it’s a grand in-joke. Much has been made – mostly by Smith herself – of her long-held reluctance to write a historical novel,but also its inevitability. The result is a book that feels so determinedly,diligently historical – so packed full of titbits and unkilled darlings – that it alienates rather than invites.
The Fraud opens in the dusty aftermath of a structural collapse:William’s library has buckled under the weight of his book collection. It is hard to shake that image as Smith’s sixth novel unfolds. But it is also hard to shake the gleeful paradox of it. Novelists are frauds,Smith tells us. Trust me,I’m a novelist.
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