Following a sold-out appearance at Cuckfield Bookfest, we spoke to novelist Zadie Smith on the pull toward historical fiction, the remnants of Victorian Britain, and doing ‘justice to the truth’.
What made you decide to write a historical novel?
I think for me every novel is a chance to learn something. You spend so long writing it, it would be a shame not to. And in this case, I really wanted to have the answer to a question I’d had since I was a child, a question both personal (for obvious reasons) and world-historical. Namely, “What is the truth of the relationship between England and Jamaica?” Writing this novel was a way of finding out more about that.
In what way do you think history and fiction sit together best?
They’re both narrative explorations. History is never satisfying as mere dates and statistics; it only becomes history when it is told in the form of a narrative. This was so clear to me as I researched The Fraud. I read so many single-volume histories of the Victorians, but each one was completely different. A 1930s book about the Victorians is completely different from those written in the 1950s, or 1970s, or 2000s. Same facts and statistics. Completely different story.
The novel begins with the ‘sheer weight of literature’ collapsing the ceiling of the protagonist’s house. In writing a narrative set in the past, do you feel confronted by a collapse of language in the present?
Not at all. The great beauty of the English language is its relative consistency. It’s why we can still read Shakespeare and Chaucer. Things change, but not to the point of incomprehension. And there is a register of English that I can write now that would be wholly comprehended by a Victorian or a Georgian, or even a medieval monk. I tried to catch that tone in The Fraud. It’s not a nostalgic prose or a false Victorian prose. It has a steady rhythm that you can read now, or you could read then.
In another interview, you said that through writing The Fraud, you wanted to do ‘absolute justice to the truth’. How did you define ‘truth’ when writing the book, and is this a definition which shifted while writing?
It’s an impossible aim. But as much as possible, I wanted to try and look at events not as I would look at them, but as Mrs Touchet would. People living in corrupt systems don’t spend every second of every day outraged by them, for example. They acclimatise. We’re doing it right now. We always do it.
The public court of opinion plays a central role throughout the book. Have any events in recent history informed your choice to focus on the issue of credibility, and the noise that often surrounds and obscures it?
I’m not the first to point it out, but it’s very interesting that one of the things we have in common with the Victorians is an affection for frauds. The 2010s and 2020s especially have thrown up fake scientists, fake millionaires, fake professors, people pretending to be racially other than they are, or richer than they are, and so on, almost all of them Millennials. A sort of “fake it till you make it” attitude. And during the Victorian period, there were a string of “Martin Guerre”-like cases, including, of course, the Tichborne case. The theory is that in periods of extreme inequality, when there seems no honest way to “make it”, then that is the moment that frauds proliferate. The public opinion in the Tichborne case was that working-class people were being thrown in jail (or sent to Australia, or publicly hanged in the streets of London) for the crime of being poor. For stealing sheep, for stealing food. The courts themselves were fraudulent in that sense. And so why shouldn’t one of them beat the toffs at their own game (by pretending to be a toff)? We often speak about right-wing populism, but left-wing populism can exist too and be surprisingly effective. (The Tichborne case proved to be a watershed. The aristocratic jury, the norm at the time, was replaced halfway through by a working-class jury, the first in British court history.)
You have spoken about the influence of Derridean philosophy on your writing. Did this play a different role when writing about the act of writing?
I don’t bring Derrida to mind very often any more, but I know he sits somewhere at the base of what I do. He makes me ask myself questions like, “What role does Jamaica play in the construction of English identity? (And vice versa)?” He makes me wonder whether the centre of British Victorianism was not actually on land but offshore. He makes you question commonsense binaries and ask yourself how oppositions like black/white, slave/master, and capital/labour actually mutually reinforce each other.
Did interrogating this period of history bring to light tensions in your own lived experience?
Not tensions exactly. I felt enormously moved thinking of my two long heritages, of Jamaican peasants and slaves and English peasants and labourers, and their entwined histories. It’s an incredible thing to come from two such interesting places and peoples.
How did writing this novel change your view of the Victorian era? Do you feel it is better represented by its progression, or its oppression?
You can’t separate them, no more than you can today. Both movements happened simultaneously. But I think the key fact on the side of optimism is that slavery ended and became a universally recognised evil. It is still practised all over the world, but it is enshrined in law as an evil. The other great progressive revolutions the Victorians set in motion, the idea that education, healthcare and housing might be natural rights and not privileges, those progressive ideas are under constant attack here and everywhere. I often feel myself to be living in the dying remnants of a progressive Victorian vision. Every time I am in a public park, a public hospital, a state school or a Peabody building still housing people in London for reasonable rents, I feel gratitude. And then every time I am in the malformed and broken post-colonial states abandoned by the British without compensation or recognition of damage done, I feel the opposite.
In a time where, you have said, the issue of ‘self-identification’ is challenged by the overwhelming presence of psychological influence, what role does the act of storytelling play? Does this make stories more or less compelling, and their meaning more or less hard to define?
It’s my job to tell human stories using my human brain under the influence of the human existence and cultures I have been exposed to. I will tell a different story from my Nigerian, Irish, Italian or Korean peers, for example; different stories from people younger or older than me, of different genders or sexualities. My perspective is mine alone. It’s my little record of existence as I see it. There is no such thing as an objective or unmediated or perfect story. But I do feel a responsibility to try and keep myself from being unduly influenced by massive digital systems of psychological persuasion, yes. It’s so hard to think for yourself at the best of times. It’s made immeasurably harder when people behind the scenes are nudging you every five minutes in the direction they want you to go for reasons of commerce. So, for me, storytelling, words on paper, is one little island of independence from all that. It may be increasingly irrelevant and pointless, everybody’s always telling me that, but I’ve started, so I’ll finish!
More details on Cuckfield Bookfest, including upcoming author talks, can be found at cuckfieldbookfest.co.uk
