Literature: Zadie Smith revisits Victorian England

She burst onto the literary scene like a storm, famous even before the publication of her first novel. She had barely written a hundred pages of “Wolf Smiles” when the rights were sold at auction for 250,000 pounds sterling. When it was published, Zadie Smith was 24 years old, sold a million of her first novel and won all the literary prizes possible.

As “Wolf Smiles” chronicles multiracial Britain through the story of one family from Bangladesh, another Anglo-Jamaican and the third of left-wing intellectuals, she is compared to Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi. She answers that her models are Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo and that the writers who impress her are Yaa Gyasi, Alexandra Kleeman or Ottessa Moshfegh, three ironic and shameless young women ready to shake up the establishment. Or Zora Neale Hurston, writer and major figure of the African-American Renaissance, for whom, at the age of fourteen, she changed her first name from Sadie has Zadie.

Icon of crossbreeding

Born to an English father from the working class of East Croydon and a Jamaican mother who emigrated to England at the age of 15, Zadie Smith immediately became an icon of mixed race and successful multicultural migration, which made her annoys enough that after the publication of her second novel, she left England and settled in New York with her husband, the writer Nick Laird, where her two children were born in 2010 and 2013.

Since then, she has been both discreet and omnipresent. An influential literary columnist and essayist, she teaches a creative writing course at New York University which is among the most popular on the continent. Each of his books is an event on the international scene. We even find it in the fashion pages of magazines since after Simone de Beauvoir, she brought the hair turban back into fashion, even if she swears that it is just for practical reasons that she wears it, just like his mother who used to tame her dreadlocks in a scarf.

First historical novel

“L’Imposture” is his sixth novel, and his first historical novel. He delves into England in the 1870s, at a time when, from bourgeois salons to the streets of working-class neighborhoods, the entire society became passionate about the Tichborne affair: Arthur Orton, a butcher from Wapping, recently returned from a long voyage to Jamaica, claims to be Sir Roger Tichborne, the heir of the late Baron Tichborne, who disappeared at sea years earlier.

The Tichborne trial remains one of the longest in English legal history. At the helm of the narration, as the superb and subtle heroine of this abundant and clever novel, Eliza Touchet: widowed before her time, she leads her life with her cousin by marriage William Ainsworth, a failed writer who dreams of being as famous as his friends Dickens, Forster or Kenealy. Abolitionist, feminist, idealist as well as austere, Mrs Touchet develops a passion for the Tichborne affair, and affection for the crucial witness and the most faithful to the Tichborne pseudonym, Andrew Bogie, a former slave from Jamaica.

An echo of our times

“L’Imposture” is a success. Funny, lively throughout its more than 500 pages, teeming with historical details without ever weighing down the narrative, it depicts an English society which, one foot in the Old World, one foot in the galloping modernity, lies to itself and is still very far from having resolved its colonial past.

And what a relevant and well-found topic! From the pen of Zadie Smith, this strange Tichborne affair, which 150 years ago filled the pages of London newspapers and awakened all kinds of human passions, echoes our times in an astonishing way. Prejudice, hypocrisy, racism, thirst for justice, anger, bitterness, heroic disinterestedness, greed: the same human passions agitate crowds and discussions in cafés.

Zadie Smith wonderfully recounts how, during the long months that the trial lasted, society fractured between the supporters of Arthur Orton and his witness Andrew Bogie, erected as heroes of the working class and the fight for freedom against all form of oppression, whether capitalist or colonialist, and the elites who cling to their privileges, or the journalists who dare to demand fact-checking and intellectual honesty.

Written by a fine critic of contemporary society, American by adoption for twenty years, “The Imposture” can even be read as an anti-Trump and anti-demagogic charge, as Tichborne, a potential imposter, awakens populist enthusiasm and flatters the crowds without shame.

The beginnings of feminism

The other subject of the novel is literature, and more precisely these strange birds that are writers, through the character of William Ainsworth, freely inspired by the life of the English writer William Harrison Ainsworth – after a the only successful novel that saw him rival Charles Dickens, he wrote a hundred others while gradually falling into terrible oblivion.

Both ridiculous and touching, Ainsworth embodies all the faults of a graphomaniac who lives only to see his former glory reborn and has taken refuge in the historical novel as one would take refuge in a harmless and kitsch world. Obviously the opposite of a Zadie Smith, who shows on the contrary to what extent we are the direct heirs of the passions and debates which ignited the 19th century^e century.

Other fascinating themes are mixed in, such as the beginnings of feminism, the debates for abolitionism or the absolute rigor of Victorian morality against the expression of desire and feelings. In a moving way, Zadie Smith indirectly traces the thread of her own family history, heir to both the English working classes and the colonized people, enslaved on the sugar plantations of Jamaica.

But it is thanks to Eliza Touchet, a larger-than-life character, that Zadie Smith delivers with “L’Imposture” a truly personal and miraculously living novel, avoiding all the pitfalls, traps and heaviness of the historical novel. Eliza’s tact in protecting the ego of her writer cousin in the name of a very old erotic affection and some intimate dramas, her melancholy devotion to the household, her enthusiasm for emerging social debates, her own hidden practice of the writing makes her one of the most endearing heroines that the writer has given us to date.

“The Imposture”, Zadie Smith (Gallimard), 544 p.

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