British literary 'wunderkind'. (Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images for RFF)
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Why bother with fiction? That’s one question. Why bother with history? That’s another. And they’ve both been torturing Zadie Smith, who has now produced the sort of fiction she once dismissed as “aesthetically and politically conservative by definition” — a historical novel. But apparently her years teaching in the United States persuaded her what fans of the genre (among whose number I include myself) have long known: “Not all historical fiction cosplays its era, and an exploration of the past need not be a slavish imitation of it. You can come at the past from an interrogative angle, or a sly remove, and some historical fiction will radically transform your perspective not just on the past but on the present.”
As a form however, historical fiction is bristling with risks. Most saliently, anachronisms — to be pointed out by pedantic readers. The exemplar in such matters is Charles Dickens. A draft of his first historical novel, Barnaby Rudge (1841), contained a minor character who was hanged “for passing bad one pound notes”. A correspondent who had seen the proofs wrote to inform him that it was only after 1797 that notes under five pounds were issued; Barnaby Rudge was set in the lead-up to the Gordon Riots of 1780. Dickens checked, assented, and replied to this Victorian pedant, wishing him: “Very many thanks… for your kind care.” (It’s noteworthy not just that he was grateful but that he took care to double-check first.)
Dickens is himself a minor character in Zadie Smith’s new novel, The Fraud, a work of historical fiction set in the 18th and 19th centuries, partly in the bit of northwest London which has inspired most of her non-historical fiction and partly in Jamaica, the narrative spreading over multiple characters and storylines. There is, to start with, the world of the real (but largely — and deservedly — forgotten) novelist William Harrison Ainsworth: his numerous but terrible books, his smug self-satisfaction and his complex domestic arrangements. These are sardonically observed through the eyes of his cousin and housekeeper Eliza Touchet — which Smith takes her to pronounce, with Dickensian aptness, “touché”. But Mrs Touchet’s attention is distracted, like that of countless others in England, with the (also real) cause célèbre of Arthur Orton, a butcher who implausibly claimed to be Sir Roger Tichborne, the long-missing heir to a large inheritance.
But the Tichborne affair, wild from start to finish, provides Smith with her situation rather than her story. Her plotline — or the best of her several — is the one woven around the Tichborne Claimant’s star witness: a Jamaican man named Andrew Bogle who insisted, even when there was little else to support Orton’s claim, that he recognised Sir Roger, a man he had once worked for. Bogle’s own story — of his enslavement and his freedom — ends up being as or more interesting than that of the other people involved in and those breathlessly following the Tichborne Case.
Smith’s handling of Bogle involves a deft synthesis of fact and fiction. And the book comes with a short paragraph acknowledging Smiths’ principal academic sources and thanking one scholar of the period in particular for having read the book in manuscript. Being at best a part-time student of this period, I suspect that I will only embarrass myself if I go about seeking anachronisms. But in any case, this isn’t the sort of book whose interest in history starts and ends with getting the facts right. If that’s all there were to it, why bother fictionalising it at all?
Much mainstream historical fiction does engage in that lower literary pleasure Smith warns of: “cosplay”. And what man doesn’t look better dressed in Mr Darcy’s shirt, or Sir Lancelot’s armour, than in a tracksuit? But historical fiction of this kitschy kind — Philippa Gregory’s Tudor novels are the recent exemplars — also gives us the chance, rare in the modern world, to look at the world through concepts few of us can use today without irony: chastity, honour, vengeance. The popular taste for this sort of fiction, and indeed for the pseudo-medieval worlds in which much fantasy is set, tells us something about our longings for a world before liberal democracy, before “health and safety”, before political correctness.
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SubscribeGood review – and has made me genuinely curious about Zadie Smith’s work. That’s about the best any review can do.
A very long time ago I read and liked White Teeth, and suspect I would find a lot to like in Ms. Smith’s subsequent oeuvre if I had not solemnly promised myself only to read novels by White men, as my response to the cancer of woke in publishing.
I can understand the retreat to historical lit with its traditionally significant readership. While to write about ‘today’ from an Anglo liberal perspective would be to be confronted with the crushing weight of moral ambiguity given the cultural intifada staged by the generation(s) below.
I’m not a fan of historical fiction, butI do like Zadie Smith’s writings and I was facinated from the start when I read about the Tichbourne affair. I love this writer’s reviewing style and it has made me think that perhaps I should give historical fiction another try (although not Gregory – I’m not intetrested in the Tudor period at all), and I shall certainly get this book.
Besides Barnaby Rudge, I recommend Dickens’s other historical novel Tale of Two Cities, and Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon.
“Pendant” lol
It would be more interesting to read about Indians in London, and indeed maybe outside London.
I have never read a Zadie Smith work, nor am I particularly interested in historical fiction, but this review has me thinking that this was a big mistake. Definitely putting this on my list of books to read in the future.
ZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzz…….
As a new subscriber, this is the most somnifacient review that I have seen in the past decade. I am now going to bed — thank you for the assist.
Well I liked it, even if it doesn’t have enough pyrotechnics for some. It made me a little curious about the book, at least, even though it is not a genre I read much of.
Be a Philistine if it makes you happy.