Going in, I was mildly familiar with the Tichbourne Case, and really enjoyed the historical nature of the work.

The author went hard in the paint with her research, and it was very much appreciated by this history buff.

I loved the character development, particularly with Eliza. It’s not often an elderly woman gets such fully-embodied writing. So often, they’re one note.

My two issues with this book were its pacing (glacial) and that the three main story arcs didn’t always blend as well as I’d like. Going back and forth was slightly jarring.

Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Random House Canada for this ARC.

The Fraud by Zadie Smith is her first historical fiction novel and I will admit this may be the hardest book I have tried to review all year. Don’t get me wrong. Like all her books, it is beautifully written but it is also very complex. The story and the title are based on a true fraud casethe Ticheborne trial but, in truth, fraud could describe pretty much every character here, some of which are also based on real people including Charles Dickens and William Harrison Ainsworth, a well-known author and rival of Dickens at the time but who has since been mostly forgotten or, to be fair, unknown to me. The story is told in the third person by Eliza Touchet, Ainsworth’s cousin, housekeeper, and lover. She develops an interest in the Ticheborne trial which concerns a nobleman, once thought dead but now supposedly returned from Australia.

As I said I wrestled with trying to understand and follow the action in this book. It often leaps around in time and there are a lot of characters and events referenced. I found myself flipping back through the pages, wondering where I lost track. Had it been a lesser writer, I suspect I would have given up but the prose, the character of Eliza, and the references to the history both of the trial and, even more, of attitudes towards slavery and the abolitionist movement kept me going and, despite my confusion, I am glad I did. However, I will definitely read it again to try to better follow and capture what I missed this first time.

I received a copy of this novel from Netgalley and Penguin Random House Canada in exchange for an honest review

I had trouble starting and continuing to read this…it was a slow start, still making my way through it.


Pp

Thanks so much to NetGalley and Penguin Press for the arc! Overall, I really liked the characters but didn't really connect with the plot. I wish the book was a little more concise, but overall it was fine.

Zadie Smith is a respected and talented novelist of our time. Years ago I read and enjoyed On Beauty, so I was excited to give this a go.

Never have I been more grateful for a detailed synopsis, as well as all the lengthy and varied reviews from people much smarter than I am (NYT, the Atlantic, Washington Post, Vulture) so I could figure out what the heck I was even reading (ugh! This book made me feel so dumb😩). It took some stamina and concentration! It’s a Victorian historical novel, set in 1873, and loosely based on historical figures. It sounds so intriguing, yet I struggled to get into the story. It was difficult to follow the with various time jumps, and the intersecting plot threads… Mrs Touchet’s life as a housekeeper for William Ainsworth. The Tichborne Trial in which the identity of Sir Roger Tichborne is under scrutiny by someone who claims to be him. And then the story of Andrew Bogle, the former slave from Hope Plantation, Jamaica. I feel a sense of accomplishment that I made it through, but had I not read through other reviews I may not have picked up on all the things she was trying to do (wait, was she actually writing about Trump?)

Alright, pat on the back for finishing, and it was cool to see Smith was just here on Sunday for Calgary’s Wordfest event. I even was offered tickets by one of the sweet friends I’ve made in this space, but I wasn’t able to make it, so I hope she found someone to go in her place who loved the book!

🤍Thank you to @penguinrandomca @penguinhamishhamilton and Netgalley for my gifted copy.

I really wanted to love this one, I read it through audio, and followed along digitally, but I just could not grasp the full story. The narrator was fantastic but the shortness of the chapters really threw me off. It broke up the story to much and made it very hard to follow. I know what happened overall, but I missed a lot of details. I can objectively see this was well written and well told but it did not work for my brain.

There is no denying that Zadie Smith can tell a story, but I wanted more from this one. It felt like she was telling two distinct stories that never really came together.

I received a copy of this novel from the publisher via NetGalley.

I had almost finished reading this before I became aware that William Ainsworth was a real historical author. I skimmed his Wikipedia page and realized how much of this novel was based on real events. (I was previously aware that Dickens and Thackeray were real historical authors, I hasten to add!) I enjoyed the writing of this novel very much and found it an engrossing read.

The various timelines did get confusing in places though - I was forever trying to calculate from the dates whether Ainsworth was currently successful or in decline, friends with Dickens or not, living in Kensal Green or not and so on. The section which recounted the Bogle family history felt poorly integrated into the novel, and while I suppose it was a deliberate decision on the part of the author, I wanted to know why Andrew Bogle gave his testimony in favour of the Tichborne claimant. I never quite grasped the timeline of the claimant's story and there were so many people called Tichborne and Doughty and some changed their names, but again, maybe that was intended to demonstrate the impenetrability of the court evidence.

I thought the ending was strong - I had become accustomed to sharing many of Mrs Touchet's assessments of people and situations that her inability to understand Henry Bogle's anger was telling.

Delighted to include this title in the September edition of Novel Encounters, my column highlighting the month’s most anticipated fiction for the Books section of Zoomer, Canada’s national culture magazine. (see column and mini-review at link)

5 "Zwooning, Zelicious, Zagnificent, Ztupendous" stars !!

Warmest thanx to Random House Canada, Netgalley and the incredible Zadie herself. This will be released September 5, 2023. I am providing an honest review.

I need to get a little gush out of my system....I love you Zadie, your mind, your creativity, your compassion and your sense of humor....I do I do I do....okay now onto the review.....

Zadie had created a masterful, immersive, important and triumphant historical biography that is not truly a biography but a backdrop for compassionate social commentary on both the Victorian novel and British society. Loosely based on historical figures such as a minor novelist, a pretender and a former Jamaican slave....tying them all together is a heroine that I will never forget a Scottish woman with a heart, a brain, a soul and who on the side likes a little kink...yes folks a little kink...just a little....

I truly cannot rave more about a novel that is written beautifully, intelligently and with such wit and depth that I would laugh, rant and cry all within a few pages. She goes deeply into each character and laughs with and at them, explores inequities in gender, sexuality, race and class with a sweep of her beautiful hands. She never preaches but with her very soft light illuminates not only truths but deep wisdoms. This is so timely for our times of identity politics where narcissism and the most toxic of people hold center stage forgetting about the millions of brothers and sisters that are truly oppressed....

Zadie knows Us deeply, intimately

Zadie has her tongue in her cheek, gives a wicked little wink and juts out her hip while at the same time opening up her long and lovely arms to embrace us with love, compassion and the deepest understandings....

Zadie, I love you, I really do...

DNF @ 17%

The story is jumping around quite a bit. And the plot lines are not really connecting for me. I might try again in the future with a hard copy.

Mrs. Eliza is a Scottish housekeeper and cousin by marriage of a once famous novelist on his decline. Andrew grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation in Jamaica. He becomes the star witness in a celebrated case, the Tichborne trial.

The writing is great- as expected. Terrific style. The story is thought-provoking and very compelling. So many themes in the story and so much interesting historical information. Not a fast read but worth the time.

Thanks to the publisher for the arc.

The last thing I want to feel about a 464-page novel after I finish it is lukewarm. Sadly, though, that was my general impression of Zadie Smith’s latest offering.

Before I begin, it helps to know that The Fraud is comprised of three main storylines: the story of Eliza Touchet, a widow, and her life with her cousin-by-marriage and writer William Ainsworth; the Tichborne trial, a wildly popular case wherein a man claimed that he was, in fact, the long presumed-dead baronet Sir Roger Tichborne; and the story of the life of Andrew Bogle, a formerly enslaved man who was one of the witnesses in the Tichborne trial.

With that in mind, I’ll start with the positives: Smith’s writing is great, and I generally enjoyed Eliza as a protagonist. At almost 70 years old, her education and life experiences make her a compelling point-of-view to follow, especially when it comes to some of the themes that the novel is trying to explore: freedom, justice, activism, love. Eliza is strongly on the side of abolitionism, having spent many years attending meetings and consuming resources on the matter; that she is an ally to and proponent of this cause is something she takes to be a key part of herself and her values. And yet, in several key scenes throughout the novel, Smith deftly unsettles this simple narrative that Eliza has built for herself: moments of tension, of discomfort, where Eliza doesn’t quite live up to her ideals, where she is distinctly confronted and unsettled by her privilege (particularly her class and racial privilege).

So much for the positives; the negatives, on the other hand, I have a lot more to say about. I started off by saying that The Fraud is comprised of three storylines because this is, in my view, one of its fundamental problems as a novel: though technically connected, the storylines are disparate, and none of them feel like they particularly go anywhere. Each of these narratives feels like it exists discretely of the others: the Eliza-and-William storyline mostly consists of meetings with the famous literary men of the time (Dickens, Thackeray, etc.); the Tichborne storyline is, of course, focused on the trial itself; and the Bogle storyline is a separate chunk introduced halfway through into the book and then concluded about 70 pages later. The Eliza parts and the trial parts alternate, seemingly without rhyme or reason, so that you go from one chapter set in the present timeline during the Tichborne trial only to be thrust into a chapter set 20 years earlier where Eliza and William are hosting some random dinner, visiting someone, talking about something, etc. The whole structure of the novel feels confused, its story so sorely lacking cohesion that I felt like I was reading 3 separate books rather than one novel.

Another issue is that The Fraud has zero narrative momentum. At 464 pages, it is a longer novel, and as a longer novel, it is all the more important for it to be able to keep the narrative moving, to sustain interest for the entire course of its story–and this was just not the case here. With the exception of the Tichborne trial story, most of the novel’s story is just…told to us: the Eliza storyline and the Bogle storyline are both in the past, both stories that have already happened and that are simply being recollected by their respective narrators. And I am just not the kind of reader who likes this style of storytelling: I would much rather read about the characters living through something than them telling me about something that they’ve already lived through. On top of this, the novel’s chapters are so short that it makes it virtually impossible to be immersed in these recollected narratives: most chapters are only a couple of pages long, and most of them follow a discrete event (a dinner, a visit, a walk, a conversation) rather than carrying over events from the previous chapter(s). The storytelling just altogether feels too sequential: this happened, then this happened, then this happened, and then here I am. It’s too inert, not dynamic enough, lacking climactic moments, drama, narrative intrigue.

Lastly, though The Fraud is clearly a heavily researched novel, it is also one whose research overtakes its narrative. More often than not, the research doesn’t enrich or enliven the story so much as pad it out. There is just so much information in this novel, and in the absence of some kind of propulsive force to keep the narrative moving, it makes the novel feel bloated: it gets tiring, after a while, to keep track of so many names and places and histories and events.

As I’m writing this, I’m realizing that “tiring” is exactly the right word to characterize my experience of reading The Fraud. It’s a novel that asks an investment of its reader that it does not reward that reader for: after the many pages of storylines, even after following so many characters over so many years and so many changes and so many places, it somehow feels like nothing really happens in this book. I picked it up; I read it; I finished it. Did I love it? No. Did I like it? Not really. It was just a book that I read–and for a book that is this long, that is this expansive, that is grappling with such interesting themes and such a rich historical period, that is just extremely disappointing.