The Fraud by Zadie SmithMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Zadie Smith became fascinated by a couple of enormous legal cases in Victorian London which tested the claims of a man from Australia who said he was the rightful heir to an aristocratic estate in Hampshire.
‘The Tichborne Claimant’, as he was known, was at the centre of much more than an epic legal battle (which he lost). He became a rallying point for radical political movements, and - strangely - a symbol of the dominance of a Catholic elite in British society.
Smith has cleverly interlocked this history with that of the once-successful novelist W.H.Ainsworth, whose popularity was overtaken by Dickens, and with the enslavement at a younger age, of the Claimant’s supporter and a former faithful family servant, Andrew Bogle. She takes a few admitted liberties with timelines, but the key points of her story match the history.
It’s quite a long novel, but not as long as the book looks because it is made up of many chapters which are mostly no more than about two pages long, which means there is an almost blank page every page or so.
I came to the novel having read a long book on the subject - The Tichborne Claimant by Douglas Woodruff (1957) - which goes into more detail than Smith, who has a broader panorama to fill. So I already knew many of the characters and legal complications. I wonder if readers coming to it fresh would be able to figure out what was going on.
Woodruff is, if anything, somewhat sympathetic to the Claimant - at least, he does not take it for granted that the court decisions dismissing his claim were correct. Smith calls her book The Fraud, so there's not much doubt about where she stands on that question. Which makes it a bit less interesting.
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