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Critics' Opinion:
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First Published:
Sep 2023, 464 pages
Paperback:
Jun 6, 2024, 0 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Grace Graham-Taylor
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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."
1
A Very Large Hole
A filthy boy stood on the doorstep. He might be scrubbed of all that dirt, eventually - but not of so many orange freckles. No more than fourteen, with skinny, unstable legs like a marionette, he kept pitching forward, shifting soot into the hall. Still, the woman who'd opened the door - easily amused, susceptible to beauty - found she couldn't despise him.
'You're from Tobin's?'
'Yes, missus. Here about the ceiling. Fell in, didn't it?'
'But two men were requested!'
'All up in London, missus. Tiling. Fearsome amount of tiling needs doing in London, madam . . .'
He saw of course that she was an old woman, but she didn't move or speak like one. A high bosom, handsome, her face had few wrinkles and her hair was black. Above her chin, a half-moon line, turned upside down. Such ambiguities were more than the boy could unravel. He deferred to the paper in his hand, reading slowly:
'Number One, St James-es Villas, St James-es Road, Tunbridge Wells. The name'...
One of Smith's gifts is for creating complicated characters who don't know themselves as well as they think they do. There are many overlapping power structures at play in The Fraud, and its characters are often unaware of their own position within them. But as always in Smith's work, there is no easy moral to the story – there are only people and the lives they inhabit...continued
Full Review
(862 words)
(Reviewed by Grace Graham-Taylor).
In The Fraud, Eliza's lover Frances is a passionate abolitionist whose commitment to the cause infects Eliza with a similar sense of urgency. Britain's Slavery Abolition Act was passed in 1833, freeing at least 800,000 people from bondage in the Caribbean, South America, and Canada. The act followed decades of campaigns from abolitionist groups, who had been fighting to end the practice since the 1780s. An often-overlooked group who were influential in the fight to end slavery were women – figures such as Hannah More, Mary Prince, and Elizabeth Heyrick (whose house Eliza and Frances visit in The Fraud) were pivotal to the abolitionist cause.
Hannah More wrote pamphlets and poems which helped popularize the abolitionist cause in its...
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