“The secret engine of the world”
Some thoughts on The Fraud
APOCALYPSE made its television debut last week! I was interviewed about the book on Amanpour and Company on PBS. Click below to watch the segment; it’s a good one!
Light spoilers for The Fraud follow—although if I had known these things about the book, I would have read it sooner!
There are 100 pages of The Fraud by Zadie Smith that are so good I couldn’t sleep after I read them. There are another 350 pages that are merely good. Uncomfortably, those dazzling 100 pages are about slavery and the people subjected to it on a Jamaican sugar plantation. They’re wedged in the middle of a novel otherwise focused on the rather small and quiet life of a literary-minded widow in Victorian England. What were those stories doing in the same book?
Most of The Fraud by Zadie Smith concerns Eliza Touchet, the aforementioned widow who works as a housekeeper for (and once did other things with) her cousin-by-marriage, the real but mostly forgotten 19th century novelist William Harrison Ainsworth. Mrs. Touchet gradually gets drawn into the spectacle of the trial of the Tichborne Claimant, a working-class butcher who returned to England from Australia saying he was Roger Tichborne, the rightful heir to a baronetcy who had been presumed dead after a shipwreck years earlier. His star witness, and only credible supporter, is Andrew Bogle, who was formerly enslaved by Sir Roger’s family on their sugar plantation and then in England. (At some point, he was freed and began to be paid, but even he barely registered it as an event.) Mrs. Touchet grows fascinated by why the seemingly honest Bogle would lie for the supposed Sir Roger, if it’s possible he’s not lying at all, and, eventually, the life that led to his entanglement with the Tichbornes and that London witness stand.
The 100 pages attempt to tell that story, reaching back to Bogle’s parents and forward to his children. It’s almost a novella within the novel, and its vibrancy threatens to blow apart the restraint of the rest of the book, which is, in part, a satire of the Victorian literary world. (Mrs. Touchet is a world class hater, and Charles Dickens, among others, dutifully shows up to be judged.) In the Bogle novella, the tools of satire—the light but pointed touch, the slight remove, the attention to contradictions and the characters who are oblivious to them—don’t result in something laughable or exaggerated (even though, incredibly, it remains quite funny). It turns out Smith can’t satirize 19th century Jamaica. Not because it would be offensive or in poor taste, but because that world, like ours, is unsatirizable. Simply describing what’s happening in front of your eyes leaves you ranting and raving and fundamentally unbelievable, driven mad by the truth or at least easy to treat as if you had been. “It’s too ridiculous to take seriously, and too serious to be ridiculous,” to quote Philip Roth by way of Naomi Klein, describing the world we’ve found ourselves in since 2020—the world that, The Fraud argues, is Jamaica’s rightful heir.
Those 100 pages of The Fraud were an answer to a question I wrestled with while writing Apocalypse: How do you write about slavery in a way that invites people to look closer, instead of turn away? Smith and I reached a similar answer, I think: You write about us, and what it feels like to live in a world still powered by the “secret engine,” as one of The Fraud’s characters calls it, the wheel of torture and exploitation that chews up some people while being almost completely ignored by those who benefit from it. (Klein calls it the “Shadow Lands,” the barely sublimated capitalist underworld that we’re all haunted by but aren’t allowed to talk about.) You write about being warped by the violence but also by the lie—the biggest lie there ever was—that what happens over there, and back then, has nothing to do with what happens here, and now. You write about a world where truth and falsehood, connections and conspiracies, facts and feelings cannot be distinguished from each other, because, while the secret engine runs, it continually injects poison into the very bedrock of reality.
“She had been standing inside the very thing she’d been looking for,” Smith writes of Mrs. Touchet, after she hears (and maybe writes?) Bogle’s story, and also about me when I started to look closely at the archaeological and environmental record of sugar plantations. The piece of research that emotionally unlocked it for me was the change in what was considered trash after a Barbados plantation adopted sugar. Before, even the enslavers hardly threw anything away, living as they were far from the markets and material comforts of Europe. After sugar, however, their trash heaps grew huge, stuffed with imported porcelain, empty wine bottles, and rubble from their mansion’s latest remodel. What does it feel like to live in a world where everything is disposable, even people and ecosystems? Unfortunately, I know exactly what it feels like.
And then The Fraud dragged me as hard as it does Charles Dickens. The very next chapter opens, “Mrs. Touchet was under the singular delusion—common at this stage of the process—that everything was connected.” And that really made me sit up and wonder where the book would go next. To be honest, I’m not sure I liked much of what came after (or before) the Bogle novella, but I’m still thinking about what the juxtaposition meant, and where the book ended up. Was Mrs. Touchet actually wrong, or was she simply incapable of acting on what she knew to be right? Was that a moral or personal failing, or was a meaningful sacrifice ever truly in her grasp? Would throwing herself on the gears of the secret engine have stopped it from turning? Does it matter, once she saw it?
