Z ADIE Smith has never set much store by consistency. “Unless you consider yourself some sort of human brand, which I don’t, you have to deal with the fact that different people are going to like different aspects of your work,” she once told this newspaper. “It’s not consistent. I am not consistent.”

None of us is. And our contradictory selves have always prompted Smith’s liveliest writing, from her dazzlingly various debut White Teeth (2000) to her essay collection, Intimations (2020). In The Fraud, her first foray into historical fiction, the theme becomes something like a rallying cry. “A person is a bottomless thing!” the protagonist Eliza thinks while watching a Jamaican-born former slave address a crowd address a crowd. “She might rush to the stage to proclaim it. A person is a bottomless thing!”

Hamish Hamilton

The novel is, in part, Smith’s attempt to confront the legacy of slavery in Jamaica – but this being Smith, it’s a slave story buried in a philosophical novel of ideas nestled in a comedy of manners set back when Willesden was a pleasant, leafy village. There is, in short, a lot going on, though there are three main strands to the narrative.

The first takes in the life and times of the rubbish Victorian novelist William Ainsworth who, for a brief period, outsold Charles Dickens, though he is now justly forgotten (“‘Amen!’ ejaculated Oswald, fervently”). Our eyes and ears here belong to his housekeeper and cousin-in-law Mrs Eliza Touchet, a shrewd, quick-witted Scottish Catholic with a zeal for social reform and a novelist’s sensibility – though she is obliged to act as helpmeet to fusty old William.

The second strand centres on the Tichborne Claimant, the cause celebre of 1873. The Claimant was a cockney butcher who swore blind that he was in fact Sir Roger Tichborne, heir to a vast fortune, believed to have perished at sea. Despite – or because of – his outrageous fraudulence, “Sir Roger” became a working-class hero, not least with Ainsworth’s second wife, Sarah, a mouthy former servant who accompanies Eliza to the trials.

Thirdly, we have the backstory of Andrew Bogle, the dignified former slave who became the star witness in the trial. When Eliza corners him after a day in court, the perspective shifts, first to Africa where his father was abducted, and then to Jamaica where we see slave society and British atrocities first-hand, a world “sunk in madness. It covered everything, like weather.”

Moment to moment, The Fraud is a delight

It’s not hard to build a case against The Fraud. The slave narrative is unforgettable, brilliantly handled – but it arrives too late. The three strands don’t always intermesh. The overlapping time frames can be confusing. The research can feel a bit In Our Time. And I wasn’t convinced by Eliza’s simultaneous(?) affairs with William and the first Mrs Ainsworth.

But remember the old definition of a novel as “a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it.” It may not wholly convince, but moment to moment, The Fraud is a delight. Smith has tremendous fun with William’s literary incontinence, the looming presence of Charles Dickens, and the sharp-witted second Mrs Ainsworth in particular. I rather liked the way the brief chapterlets cascade in on one another, too, giving the novel a kaleidoscopic form.

And the jarring leaps in tone serve a purpose. For much of the novel, we experience slavery as an idea: something to be debated in drawing rooms, campaigned against, or perhaps avoided altogether (as in William’s terrible “Jamaica novel”.) Smith emphasises its effect on the bodies of the enslaved: the ears burned off for petty infringements, the illegitimate babies murdered, the noses, fingers, eyes lost to the disfigurements of disease. Eliza is constantly asking: “What can we know of other people?” One answer is: so little that we can reduce them to less than things.

But the novel is not primarily concerned with evil itself – more with how an entire society could convince itself that evil isn’t really happening and, indeed, never really happened. At one point Eliza muses that England isn’t a real place at all: “Everything the English really did and really wanted, everything they desired and took and discarded – all of that they did elsewhere.”

Inconsistent, yes. But a novel full of people, ideas, humour, feeling and something like moral truth – the stuff of life.

The Fraudis published by Hamish Hamilton (£20, 451pp)