The Fraud: What, truth?

You can’t read Zadie Smith’s The Fraud in 2024 and not feel cold shudders of recognition for how easy it is to distort/create truth for an audience willing to believe – or disbelieve – anything so long as those fabricated facts meet their aims.

Set in the 19th century, historical fiction does its best work here by using the past to illuminate pressing truths of the present. The novel follows the infamous trial of a man claiming to be Sir Roger Tichborne – who had bee presumed dead at sea. The “Claimant” – despite being very obviously a butcher and not an aristocrat – continues to insist he is Sir Roger, and finds swelling numbers of supporters willing to accept his – clearly fabricated – claim to be the real Sir Roger. His supporters, like the Claimant, explain away the obvious and glaring inconsistencies by way of conspiracies against him by the press and others. You don’t have to squint too hard to see the connections to our Current Political Moment.

I guess that’s not really what the book is entirely about – it’s also about Eliza, who lives with her comically terrible author-cousin, William Ainsworth, and tries (albeit unsuccessfully) to edit his horrible books. In Ainsworth’s new wife – once his maid – Eliza debate the credulity of the Tichborne trial and in doing dramatizes the fundamental crisis of our moment: We cannot agree on basic facts of reality. In Eliza’s rational understanding she knows and believes the Claimant to be utter nonsense, but finds herself wanting to trust the absurd possibility that he could, indeed, be Tichborne.

As the reader-surrogate, while Eliza debates within herself the possibility of the utterly implausible (as well as in the morality of taking money she knows to be earned through slavery; and of the ethics of letting Ainsworth continue to believe he is a good writer when he is Definitely Not; and of the ease with which we might lie by omission when it comes to the border of love) we, too, are called to defend our conviction of what we believe True, and how far we are willing to go to bend that truth to accommodate the feelings of those we love.