The Fraud by Zadie Smith
Published by Hamish Hamilton
THE central character of Zadie Smith’s first historical novel, Eliza Touchet, is a Scottish abolitionist.
Eliza is housekeeper to her cousin, the Victorian novelist William Ainsworth, then writing one of his many potboilers, this time about Bonnie Prince Charlie and Culloden. Eliza is from Edinburgh and described as “prickly”.
On the first page of her story, we also learn she’s “both canny and hard, like most Scots”. You think uh oh, here we go – the old stereotypes.
But then Smith quickly tugs the rug from under the reader by using an exquisitely timed “c***” reminding us that she’s one of the most knowing writers alive; that she kens Liz Lochhead from Limmy; that we’re in for a wickedly witty read.
The year is 1873 and Eliza is obsessed with the lengthy Tichborne Trial, a case that revolved around a man claiming to be the real Sir Roger Tichborne.
Eliza attends court with William’s much younger new wife, Sarah. Sarah is from Stepney; she’s illiterate and sweary. She’s also one of Smith’s great comic creations.
“Sir Roger” is assisted by a neat and inscrutable elderly man called Andrew Bogle, who grew up on a plantation in Jamaica. Andrew talks to Eliza about his father Anaso, a slave sold to a Scotsman, and here we get to the hard kernel of Smith’s tale.
We learn of the indignities Anaso suffers under the Glaswegian slave driver, Ballard. We read about the 1831 Sam Sharpe-led slave rebellion in Jamaica and how an aggrieved Eliza compares this to the history of unjust evictions in the Highlands: “In Scotland, I hope we remember what it is to have land taken from us, and not to be permitted to work it!”
Ballard himself is a total bastard with “a Glaswegian sense of humour” who “prided himself on witty naming” as with “the ugliest woman … Aphrodite, the lame watchman, Hercules”. Smith’s uncomfortable mention of Glasgow japery stings as it should; the city has a cruel streak.
Given Robert Burns’s close call as a potential slave manager, it’s entirely appropriate that a writer with family from Jamaica makes us see ourselves as others see us.
SMITH has a stark post-colonial judgement on England too when she has Eliza think: “Everything the English really did and really wanted, everything they desired and took and used and discarded – all of that they did elsewhere.”
Eliza craves kindness but knows “… how hard it proves to keep the lives of others in mind! Everything conspires against it. Life itself”.
The story writhes in the nightmare of history – the traumas of slavery, the Peterloo massacre – that by extension illuminate more recent horrors like Grenfell and the seemingly endless triumphs of the unaccountable; the indifference to cruelty shown by slaveowners and absentee landlords of the past; the nabobs like Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman in the present … At the trial Eliza witnesses the near-inexplicable belief in conman “Sir Roger” but registers “a sincere mass emotion – dispossession – being twisted and manipulated for ulterior purposes”.
She reads conspiracy theories linked to the case and “pages given over to the anti-vaccination movement, for who knew the true intentions of these rich men and their needles?”.
What Smith shows in this fiction is that if you oppress a people long enough, if you strip them of dignity through poverty and austerity measures, you brutalise them and in turn, they believe in frauds. They will buy into the likes of “Sir Roger” and his claims, a Hitler, or today vote for Trump.
Smith’s ironies have perfect pitch as with William moaning about George Eliot: “Is this all that these modern ladies’ novels are to be about? People?”
Then there’s a six-line diagnosis on the hurdles women face “in the ladies’ steeplechase” that’s utterly prescient. And too, beautifully euphonious sentences like “Nonesuch slipped pulverized pennyroyal into Myra’s cup”.
This is historical fiction that rejects “all those magical gypsies, witches, ghosts!” but embraces “stories of human beings, suffering, deluding others and themselves, being cruel to each other or kind. Usually both”.
The Fraud sees Zadie Smith go mano a mano with the likes of Charles Dickens and Hilary Mantel.
There’s trickery here and artifice but all in the pursuit of deeper truths that argue against real deceit.
That demand, as Malcolm X did, there be no skulduggery, no flimflam, no compromise, no sell-out.
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