Available:*
Library | Material Type | Item Barcode | Shelf Number | Status |
---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Avon-Washington Township Public Library | Adult Fiction Book Hardback | 120791003071490 | F SMI | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
The New York Times bestseller * One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year * One of NPR's Best Books of the Year * Named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly and BookPage * One of Oprah Daily's Best Novels of 2023
"[A] brilliant new entry in Smith's catalog . . . The Fraud is not a change for Smith, but a demonstration of how expansive her talents are." -- Los Angeles Times
From acclaimed and bestselling novelist Zadie Smith, a kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England, about who gets to tell their story--and who gets to be believed
It is 1873. Mrs. Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper--and cousin by marriage--of a once-famous novelist, now in decline, William Ainsworth, with whom she has lived for thirty years.
Mrs. Touchet is a woman of many interests: literature, justice, abolitionism, class, her cousin, his wives, this life and the next. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr. Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of facades, in which nothing is quite what it seems.
Andrew Bogle, meanwhile, grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica. He knows every lump of sugar comes at a human cost. That the rich deceive the poor. And that people are more easily manipulated than they realize. When Bogle finds himself in London, star witness in a celebrated case of imposture, he knows his future depends on telling the right story.
The "Tichborne Trial"--wherein a lower-class butcher from Australia claimed he was in fact the rightful heir of a sizable estate and title -- captivates Mrs. Touchet and all of England. Is Sir Roger Tichborne really who he says he is? Or is he a fraud? Mrs. Touchet is a woman of the world. Mr. Bogle is no fool. But in a world of hypocrisy and self-deception, deciding what is real proves a complicated task. . . .
Based on real historical events, The Fraud is a dazzling novel about truth and fiction, Jamaica and Britain, fraudulence and authenticity and the mystery of "other people."
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Smith's mesmerizing latest (after the essay collection Feel Free) centers on a real-life Victorian cause célèbre involving a man who claims to be a long-lost English aristocrat. The story opens in 1873, when Scottish widow Eliza Touchet (like most of the novel's characters, a historical figure) has spent four decades as the housekeeper for novelist William Ainsworth, her cousin by marriage. One of her distractions from her unrewarding life is the highly publicized controversy surrounding the so-called Tichborne Claimant. English aristocrat Roger Tichborne is believed to have drowned off the Brazilian coast in 1854. Twelve years later, however, a man who says he's Sir Roger begins a lengthy attempt to claim the Tichborne title and fortune. As a spectator at the 1871 civil trial the claimant initiates to establish his identity, Eliza doubts his story yet instinctively believes one of the witnesses on his behalf, a formerly enslaved man named Andrew Bogle. After the jury rules against the claimant and he is arrested for perjury and fraud, Eliza introduces herself to Bogle. An abolitionist, she's moved by his dignity and vulnerability, and persuades him to tell her his story. In the process, she realizes that she, like Ainsworth, is a writer. Smith weaves Eliza's shrewd and entertaining recollections of her life, a somber account of Bogle's ancestry and past, brief excerpts from Ainsworth's books, and historic trial transcripts into a seamless and stimulating mix, made all the more lively by her juxtaposing of imagination with first- and secondhand accounts and facts. The result is a triumph of historical fiction. (Sept.)
Booklist Review
Eliza Touchet, William Harrison Ainsworth's sharp-witted cousin by marriage, has long been essential to the writer's existence as, at very least, his muse, confidante, housekeeper, protector, first reader, and copyist. In 1873, William's novels are no longer best-sellers and funds are low, but at 63 he's marrying his 26-year-old maid, Sarah, with whom he has a young daughter, further complicating Eliza's fraught situation. In a triumph of sly narration, Smith has Eliza ruefully and teasingly reveal the hidden facets of her life, including the moral peril of being an abolitionist with ties to a "Jamaican fortune" poisoned by slavery. Rigorous Eliza can't resist accompanying down-to-earth Sarah to a London courtroom to witness a case that has captivated the country as an Australian butcher pursues his claim that he is a long-lost British aristocrat, supported by gripping testimony from Andrew Bogle, a formerly enslaved Black man. Smith's history-rooted and trenchant portrayals of largely forgotten Ainsworth, Bogle, and the Tichborne Claimant, along with such famous figures as Charles Dickens, delectably and incisively interrogate recognition and erasure, fraud and gullibility, prejudice and injustice. Wielding delectably honed language in pithy chapters spiked with surprising revelations, needling observations, and lacerating truths, Smith, in her most commanding novel to date, dramatizes with all-too relevant insights crucial questions of veracity and mendacity, privilege and tyranny, survival and self, trust and betrayal.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Versatile, brilliant, and best-selling Smith is always a must-read, and this spectacularly entertaining and resonant historical novel will have enormous appeal.
Guardian Review
Zadie Smith has spent a long time concertedly not writing historical fiction. Determined to stay in the present, she has been on guard against the lures of the past. But history got her in the end, calling her down a grassy track to a Victorian village called Willesden. Thank goodness: we need minds like hers on the job. The Fraud, her sixth novel, is partly about an enslaved man on a Jamaican sugar plantation, and it's a comedy: those two things at once. Few would dare; fewer could pull it off as Smith does here, mixing narrative delight with a vein of rapid, skimming satire as she sketches scenes of life in 19th-century England and the Caribbean. The novel is a complicated mosaic of episodes from interleaved plots. Much of it follows a bizarre court case, "a tragicomedy of obscene length", that gripped the British public in the 1870s. Sir Roger Tichborne, heir to a baronetcy and a fortune, was thought to have been lost at sea, but a cockney-born butcher in Australia declared himself to be the living Sir Roger and set out to London to prove his identity. The hearings extended over years. In parlours across England, evening newspapers were scoured for Tichborne developments. We cross the threshold into one particular household, the home of the real-life novelist William Ainsworth, his young wife Sarah, and the woman who has shared her life with him over 40 years: Eliza Touchet. The historical Eliza is known only from a few letters and scrapbooks, and the copy of A Christmas Carol that Dickens signed to her. Surveying the shape of the gap, its spaciousness and possibility, Smith has made her up. The queer lover of a long-mourned woman; the male novelist's muse, his housekeeper, his friend and intellectual partner; the pitied or puzzled-over "third wheel" in other people's marriages; Catholic, abolitionist, writer. "What would it be like to have a name for all these various people and urges within herself? But Mrs Touchet was her name!" Eliza's long relationship with Ainsworth is beautifully observed, its joys shining amid the cartoon absurdities of managing a Great Man. Smith has a high time with Ainsworth, author of 41 forgotten novels, purveyor of preposterous plots and archaic language that no one ever used. Muskets, laces, witches, livid lightning: sceptical Eliza skims enough of his latest offering to deliver the necessary praise ("'A triumph!' she ejaculated") but she finds it all unreadable. Reflecting sadly on William's preoccupation with "the distant, storied past", she regrets his lack of attention to "the kinds of stories that were right in front of him". Ainsworth works on what he calls his "Jamaica novel", though it features nothing Jamaican until a paragraph at the end vaguely evokes "long savannahs fringed with groves of cocoa trees". Smith notes the inadequacy and does better. The prime witness in the trial, staunch supporter of the "Tichborne Claimant", was an ageing Black man named Andrew Bogle who had spent most of his life as valet to an earlier Tichborne. His restrained testimony survives in court transcripts. But there was more to Bogle than being a servant of Tichbornes. What unspoken experiences have brought him to this witness box? It's Eliza who takes him to a chophouse and asks. Smith devotes most of the second half of her book to a version of Bogle's history, reaching back into the 1770s when his father was a boy, newly arrived on Hope Plantation. It's a story of family inheritance and parenthood, agony and loss. We hear the voice of enslaved Johanna after months on the treadmill, and the silence of Bogle in Dorset in the 1830s, feeling a "well-fed fraud", screaming only in his dreams. This book within the book might stand alone. But in all her novels, Smith refuses single trajectories and central heroes. Here, in glimpses and panoramas, she finds the meshing fibres of the world that link Bogle with the eminent Victorian novelist writing romances, with the Stepney woman cheering an impostor in a courtroom, and with Eliza. The Fraud deals in patterns of juxtaposition, in foils and reflections. It might be the holes that keep opening in the sturdy fabric of Victorian social life, or the routine travesties of justice perpetrated in Kingston while Londoners are absorbed in the minutiae of Tichborne. The rumblings of connection can be most powerful when only obscurely perceived. On one page: the grief and fury of Bogle, waiting at table while his white masters discuss the catastrophic burning of a slave village. A page earlier: Eliza's astonished feeling of exclusion as a young Black man and woman turn away from her to carry on conversations of their own. In all this multiplicity, different models of Victorian fiction are inherited and transformed. Being tugged away from Eliza is not unlike being tugged from Dorothea Brooke to consider the other inhabitants of Middlemarch. As it happens, Eliza is reading that very novel. In a priceless momentary exchange, William frowns at her peculiar interest in "a lot of people going about their lives in a village". "I like it," says Eliza contentedly, seeing no reason to explain. As for Dickens, there's no avoiding him. "He was everywhere, like a miasma." He's there at Eliza's literary dinners; he's there when anyone tries to describe street children or lawyers. Smith keeps up a splendidly exasperated satire on her omnipresent forebear. She also gets free of him. Dickens did not write Bogle's story. The Fraud is a curious combination of gloriously light, deft writing and strenuous construction. There's a risk of readerly bafflement as bright shards of narrative are shaken into unpredictable combinations across time and place. But the novel's hybridity becomes part of its fascination. It slows and expands lavishly in honour of its Victorian subjects, yet its chapters are elliptical half-scenes chosen with modernist economy. Happily its eight "volumes" can be bound with one spine. Here is historical fiction with all the day-lit attentiveness that Eliza hopes for: "stories of human beings, struggling, suffering, deluding others and themselves, being cruel to each other and kind. Usually both." Generous and undogmatic as ever, Smith makes room for "both".
Kirkus Review
An obscure English novelist and a missing-heir trial are the real historical springboards for Smith's latest fiction. Eliza Touchet is cousin and housekeeper to William Ainsworth, whose novel Jack Sheppard once outsold Oliver Twist but who, by 1868, has been far eclipsed by his erstwhile friend Dickens. Widower William is about to marry his maid Sarah Wells, who has borne him a child. Characteristically, he leaves the arrangements to Eliza, who manages everything about his life except the novels he keeps cranking out, which his shrewd cousin knows are dreadful. The new Mrs. Ainsworth is obsessed with the man claiming to be Sir Roger Tichborne, heir to a family fortune who was reported drowned in a shipwreck. The Claimant, as he is called, is likely a butcher from Wapping, but Sarah is one of many working-class Britons who passionately defend him as a man of the people being done wrong by the toffs. Eliza gets drawn into the trial by her fascination with Andrew Bogle, formerly enslaved by the Tichbornes in Jamaica, who recognizes the Claimant as Sir Roger. A Roman Catholic in Protestant Britain and William's former lover who's been supplanted by a younger woman, Eliza feels a connection to Bogle as a fellow outsider. (Some pointed scenes, however, make it clear that this sense of kinship is one-sided and that well-intentioned Eliza can be as patronizing as any other white Briton.) Smith alternates the progress of the trial with Eliza's memories of the past, which include tart assessments of William's circle of literary pals, who eventually make clear their disdain for his work, and intriguing allusions to her affair with William's first wife and to her S & M sex with William. (Eliza wielded the whips.) It's skillfully done, but the minutely detailed trial scenes provide more information than most readers will want, and a lengthy middle section recounting Bogle's African ancestry and enslaved life, though gripping, further blurs the narrative's focus. Historical fiction doesn't seem to bring out Smith's strongest gifts; this rather pallid narrative lacks the zest of her previous novels' depictions of contemporary life. Intelligent and thoughtful but not quite at this groundbreaking writer's usual level of excellence. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Through decades of decline, Eliza Touchet has kept house for William Harrison Ainsworth and continued to edit his egregious prose. She remembers the 1830s, when a backbiting cohort of British literati celebrated Ainsworth almost as much as up-and-comer Dickens. Thirty years later, a new national fixation on the controversial Tichborne Trial intrudes on Eliza's orderly management of yet another move by her boss to less expensive quarters. The prickly Scotswoman scorns news of the trial until she has the chance to interview a witness for the defense--a supporter of the Australian butcher claiming to be heir to the Tichborne baronetcy, presumed dead. Andrew Bogle, even more than Eliza, has been staunch. He says so in one of the many brilliant character voices that Smith herself performs in this audio adaptation of her latest novel. Performing Scottish Eliza, Jamaican Andrew, and Britons from all social classes, Smith imbues her writing with added authenticity for listeners. She even sings a few bars (applying her jazz background to her sixth novel as deftly as she incorporated a love of dance in Swing Time, her fifth), demonstrating that genuine self-expression pays off, though not for poor Ainsworth. VERDICT A must-buy audio. Smith's intricately constructed pastiche of 19th-century British literature, an indictment of cultural hypocrisy, is superb.--Lauren Kage