Add Category
FICTION
The Fraud
Zadie Smith
Hamish Hamilton, $34.99
In 1871, the most famous man in London was a ruddy-faced butcher from Wagga Wagga. His name was Tom Castro – or perhaps Arthur Orton – but he claimed to be Roger Tichborne, the heir to a venerable English fortune. It was a brazen deception, a great Aussie swindle.
Young Roger had disappeared decades earlier, lost in a shipwreck off the coast of Brazil. But his heartsick mother, Lady Tichborne, kept up the search, buoyed by the rumour that Roger had survived the wreck and made his way to Australia (a rumour started by an enterprising psychic).
Zadie Smith has a lot of fun in her historical novel, The Fraud.Credit: Getty
When Castro got wind of the search, he spun a tale of stormy rescue and memory loss, the rollicking stuff of adventure novels. But the discrepancies were glaring. Roger was educated; Castro barely literate. Roger spoke fluent French; Castro not a word. Roger was a slight and willowy fellow; Castro rotund and jowly. Roger had an elaborate tattoo; Castro not a mark. But the elderly Lady Tichborne was adamant – her son was home. When she died, the matter landed in court: first as an inheritance dispute and then as a criminal trial for perjury.
News of the Tichborne claimant captivated the Commonwealth. There was something intoxicating – almost mighty – about a working-class man from the outer colonies on a quest to get what he was owed. Even, or perhaps especially, if that man was a barefaced pretender.
Credit:
Zadie Smith’s new novel, The Fraud, is built around the Tichborne case and its courtroom vaudeville, but she is far from the first storyteller to catch a dose of “Tichbornia”. Edward Lear, George Bernard Shaw and Lewis Carrol all wrote about the trial. There’s been a film or two, an episode of The Simpsons, and more than 20 largely forgotten novels. Local historian Robyn Annear’s account, The Man Who Lost Himself, was published in 2002.
But there is something enduring about the Tichborne saga – a kind of allegorical plasticity. Every era has its imposters, identity shibboleths and shared delusions, and so we stare into that Westminster courtroom the same way we stare into a funhouse mirror, to laugh at our own distortions.
Smith’s post-Trump, post-Brexit, post-Queen retelling gives us a tale of a credulous populism, exalted buffoons and the bloody machinery of empire. (“England was not a real place at all,” she writes. “England was an elaborate alibi.”) But above all, The Fraud is study of truths and the people who concoct them: liars, lovers, lawyers and – worst of all – novelists.