Zadie Smith has spent a long time concertedly not writing historical fiction. Determined to stay in the present, she has been on guard against the lures of the past. But history got her in the end, calling her down a grassy track to a Victorian village called Willesden. Thank goodness: we need minds like hers on the job. The Fraud, her sixth novel, is partly about an enslaved man on a Jamaican sugar plantation, and it’s a comedy: those two things at once. Few would dare; fewer could pull it off as Smith does here, mixing narrative delight with a vein of rapid, skimming satire as she sketches scenes of life in 19th-century England and the Caribbean.
The novel is a complicated mosaic of episodes from interleaved plots. Much of it follows a bizarre court case, “a tragicomedy of obscene length”, that gripped the British public in the 1870s. Sir Roger Tichborne, heir to a baronetcy and a fortune, was thought to have been lost at sea, but a cockney-born butcher in Australia declared himself to be the living Sir Roger and set out to London to prove his identity. The hearings extended over years.
