Books you need to read this October

In a recent New Yorker article, Zadie Smith talked about the seeming inevitability of every English author writing a historical novel.

She resisted for years, she said, despite having a quiet obsession with a particular Victorian court case, on the basis that if a novel “could have been written at any time in the past hundred years, well, then, that novel is not quite doing its job.”

After mulling over this idea for 11 years, Smith has finally given in, and to great effect. The Fraud tells the story of London housekeeper Mrs Eliza Touchet, and her increasing obsession with the “Tichborne Trial”, in which a man long-thought dead has supposedly returned to claim his fortune.

Whether this man is indeed Mr Tichborne or a butcher from Wapping is almost by the by, because at the centre of the trial is the Tichborne claimant’s key witness, Mr Andrew Bogle. A former slave, and long-time servant to the Tichborne family, it’s with him that Mrs Touchet’s undivided focus lies.

As with many period novels, we begin in aristocratic London. But halfway through, we’re transported to Jamaica to pursue Mr Bogle’s unendingly tragic story.

Whereas other stories in this setting might give a nod, at most, to the horrific conditions of the sugar plantations, it’s rare for us to see it beside those callously enjoying the benefits on the other side of the world, and in such miserable focus. 

The sudden shift to Jamaica, while powerful, does seem a little clunky. Given this is Smith’s first foray into historical fiction, it’s no surprise you can see the mechanics a little more clearly, compared to her contemporary North West London fiction in which she is truly a master of veiling her authorly intent. 

That said, our London base is in fact 19th-century North West London, the now chaotic Edgeware Road then surrounded by “fields as far as the eye can see”, and walking down the now-crammed Kilburn High Road, you might then see only one “toothless farmer driving a crowd of pigs with a stick”.

It’s a perfect nod to her North West London roots, while still succeeding in writing a very different kind of novel.

Smith may have actually done the thing she swore she’d never do, but contrary to her past thoughts on historical fiction, she tells this old story through a nuanced, contemporary lens.

The Fraud by Zadie Smith is published by Hamish Hamilton at £20

Naomi Klein is known for her razor-sharp sociopolitical analysis. Book after book, she has located and defined multiple endemic issues, laying out causes and consequences, and perspicuously explaining the solutions.

She is close to the last person I would imagine falling down an internet rabbit hole, let alone writing a book about it. But lockdown was a weird time and, stranded on the coast of British Columbia, “on a rock at the dead end of a street that is three hours...from the closest city”, there was little else to do but take to the internet.

Her obsession centres around the woman she has been increasingly confused with over the years: Naomi Wolf, or “Other Naomi”. Wolf made a name for herself as a new-wave feminist with her 1990 title The Beauty Myth, wrote regularly for publications such as The Guardian, and worked as a political consultant for Al Gore.

But somehow over the last few years, she’s become a major advocate and regular talking head for the alt-right, tweeting about chemtrails and vaccine conspiracies. In short, she appears now to be the polar opposite of Klein, or in other words she has become Klein’s doppelganger.

While the premise might seem somewhat narrow and silly, it’s this biographical element that makes it so particularly readable.

Klein uses her doppelganger fixation to speak of bigger and more insidious problems which she terms the “mirror world”: the rise of conspiracy theories, of our virtual selves, of bizarre political alliances—such as Wolf and the alt-right.

If, like myself, you might struggle with a 360-page complex political analysis, this personal narrative weaving through the text will keep you hooked.

The strange angle from which Klein has approached these problems also creates an entirely fresh perspective. It’s not so much the facts that are new, but the manner in which she lays them side by side.

What, you might ask, have Native Canadian rights got to do with COVID-19 policies? What has autism to do with the Holocaust? It sounds crazy, but with each of these bizarre tandems, Klein’s argument grows stronger. 

While this might seem a departure from what Klein calls her “real work”, she has attacked this internet rabbit hole obsession with the same rigour and care she applies to the rest of her writing. Only this time, we get a peek of Klein herself, and it’s all the more potent for it.  

"For centuries, doubles have been understood as warnings or harbingers. When reality starts doubling, refracting off itself, it often means that something important is being ignored or denied—a part of ourselves and our world we do not want to see—and that further danger awaits if the warning is not heeded.

That applies to the individual but also to entire societies that are divided, doubled, polarised, or partitioned into various warring, seemingly unknowable camps. Societies like ours. 

Alfred Hitchcock called the tumultuous state of living in the presence of doppelgangers 'vertigo' in his 1958 classic of the same name, but from my experience, an even more resonant term is one used by the Mexican philosopher Emilio Uranga in 1952: zozobra.

A Spanish word for existential anxiety and deep gloom, zozobra also evokes generalised wobbliness: “a mode of being that incessantly oscillates between two possibilities, between two affects, without knowing which one of those to depend on”—absurdity and gravity, danger and safety, death and life. Uranga writes, “In this to and fro the soul suffers, it feels torn and wounded.” 

Philip Roth explored this push and pull in his doppelganger novel Operation Shylock: “It’s too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous,” he wrote of a duplicate Roth. That sentence has become my mantra during this uncanny period.

Are the political movements Other Naomi helps lead ridiculous, unworthy of attention—or are they part of a serious shift in our world that needs our urgent reckoning? Should I be laughing or crying? Am I sitting still on this rock, or is everything moving very fast? 

If doppelganger literature and mythology is any guide, when confronted with the appearance of one’s double, a person is duty bound to go on a journey—a quest to understand what messages, secrets and forebodings are being offered. So that is what I have done.

Rather than push my doppelganger away, I have attempted to learn everything I can about her and the movements of which she is a part.

I followed her as she burrowed deeper and deeper into a warren of conspiracy rabbit holes, places where it often seems that my own Shock Doctrine research has gone through the looking glass and is now gazing back at me as a network of fantastical plots that cast the very real crises we face."

Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein is published by Allen Lane at £25