The Fraud review: Zadie Smith’s first foray into historical fiction is both splendidly modern and authentically old

The ‘NW’ author brings a real 19th-century trial to life in a novel that resonates with themes of race, class and money – and has much to say about Britain today, writes Martin Chilton

Zadie Smith creates a compelling picture of a rumbustious Victorian household (Vittorio Zunino Celotto / Getty)

“One of the complications of managing decline was nostalgia,” writes Zadie Smith in her latest novel, The Fraud. Set in Victorian times, the book is her first foray into historical fiction – but it also has so much to say about our present disintegrating little island and its obsession with sentimental reminiscence.

The Fraud is a complex mosaic of interweaving plots, set around the “Tichborne Claimant” battle, a legal cause célèbre in the 1870s and a case Smith says she has been thinking about for more than a decade. The trial of a man claiming to be Sir Roger Tichborne, heir to a fortune who was thought lost at sea, lasted 140 days and consumed the attention of the public. Was he really a baronet or just an imposter, a butcher from Wapping?

The reader sees the trial through the eyes of widowed Scottish housekeeper Eliza Touchet, who is living with her cousin William Harrison Ainsworth, a once famous writer who is now in a permanent professional slump, churning out tedious, unreadable historical fiction. Smith captures his personal decline in one brutal passage, describing how a “handsome young buck” of the 1830s has turned into “this whiskery, jowly, dejected, old man”.