In her review of Zadie Smith’s latest novel, The Fraud, Alexandra Harris (The Guardian) writes, “Inspired by a celebrated court case, Smith’s dazzling historical novel combines deft writing and strenuous construction in a tale of literary London and the horrors of slavery.” [Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.] Zadie…
Zadie Smith s The Fraud proves her a worthy heir of Mantel and Dickens thenational.scot - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thenational.scot Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Set mostly in 19th-century England, “The Fraud” marks Zadie Smith’s shift from transcultural concerns. Her more contemporary “Swing Time,” narrated in first person, followed the entangled lives of two.
Ever since Zadie Smith burst on to the literary scene with her deservedly award winning first novel White Teeth, mostly written while she was still an undergraduate at Cambridge, she has focussed on contemporary themes, especially multiculturalism and racial identity, in places as far apart as London and Boston. This is perhaps hardly surprising given her own family background with a Jamaican mother and an English father. Her latest book The Fraud sees a dramatic change of direction – an historical novel partly set in 19th Century London and centred on the case of the Tichborne Claimant and literary circles in London and partly on slavery in Jamaica. It might be set in the past but the book still comes with the feisty vibrant style, entertaining dialogues, witty and satirical asides, that characterise Smith's previous novels. The plotting is as complex as her earlier work and she weaves a path that creates a web of interconnections, often quite unsuspected. The literary element
The trial at the center of Zadie Smith’s new novel, The Fraud, has all the ingredients of a reckoning with Victorian Britain’s colonial wealth and the crimes upon which it rested. The year is 1869, and a butcher, Andrew Orton, purports to be Roger Tichborne, the heir to the Tichborne-Doughty fortune, who was long thought to be dead. The Tichborne Claimant is defended first by his mother, though she dies in the first few pages of The Fraud, and then by Andrew Bogle, former valet to another member