The Accidental

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The narrative's heavy & repeated emphasis on the hermetic world of cinema— it's an artificial construct, a world within a world & the plot mirrors that, its constant preoccupation with images/photographs & their reality (the infamous human pyramid pic from the Iraq invasion of 2003 finds a place here), the ephemerality of the moment behind them, its interwoven motifs of light & darkness through which the characters fumble towards a clear-seeing perspective, all stress It is about actually seeing, being there. Are the readers alert enough to take the hint to pay attention to the artifice? Remembering Bergman’s films, Eve asks: “Did dark times naturally result in dark art?” [p. 178]. Do they? Is The Accidental itself a dark novel about a dark time? If so, how so? She has an immediate effect, as she gets Magnus to come down for dinner and spend the entire meal with the family. She spends time with Astrid while she films but then, while they are crossing a bridge over a road, throws the camera down into the road. The Accidental may claim the record for time spent in my reading queue - I bought it over five years ago, and finally got around to reading it this weekend. When I bought it, it had already generated quite a buzz - nominated (unsuccessfully) for the Booker prize, winning the Whitbread. I wasn't sure what to expect.

Teen-aged Magnus has retreated deep within himself, grappling with his complicity in the tragic death of a classmate and the particular bewilderment of a privileged young man who has everything but the attention of his parents. Flitting about like a moth is young Astrid, a budding videographer and keen observer of the arbitrary and contrary unfolding around her. Astrid is the novel's strongest voice, the character I could have spent all of my time with, for her innocence is genuine, her clear heart a clean space in which to linger, after being sullied in the moral decrepitude of her ineffectual parents. The only problem with the brilliance of Astrid as a fictional creation is that it rather makes you wish that the whole novel was hers. Which is not to say that the other characters are exactly bland, only that they don't radiate the same sense of discovery. (...) The Accidental has an infectious sense of fun and invention. The story goes through some surprising reversals and arrives at a satisfying conclusion, which is also a beginning. But afterwards, it's the child's voice you remember: it is Astrid's book." - Steven Poole, The Guardian S)pellbinding ..... Though The Accidental is not a conventionally funny novel, readers may find themselves laughing -- in surprise and delight -- at the way Smith takes a literary trope and riffs on it until she's turned it inside out, the way a great jazz musician might." - Jeff Turrentine, The Washington Post

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The story is told in the third person but with the focus changing from character to character. All the four characters get their turn (or, rather, multiple turns) and all four have things to reveal and things to hide and all four change during the course of the book. a b Caldwel, Gail (22 January 2006). "Perfect stranger". The Boston Globe . Retrieved 30 March 2008. I cannot believe this book is on the 1001 books list. Do the people who write the list not like people who read books anymore? Why would they punish us so? 1001 list writers, once again I question you. Why?

It's difficult for any writer to pull off rotating viewpoints, but Smith does it perfectly, without a hint of clumsiness or tentativeness. (...) It's especially hard considering how disparate the characters are. (...) It pays to be suspicious of writers who tie things up too neatly, who end novels a little too perfectly. But Smith doesn't have this problem -- the last sentence of the book manages to be enlightening, confusing and almost destructive in its simple power. It doesn't tie things up; it almost unravels whatever ties the reader has invented while reading the book." - Michael Schaub, San Francisco Chronicle Having read four books by Ali Smith, I have had a strong sense that she may be secretly Roman Catholic, or was raised Catholic. The only thing I've been able to find out by online research is that she attended St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Primary School (Wikipedia). That would have been enough to form her moral conscience and sense of social justice for the poor in that distinctly Catholic way that I find expressed in so many subtle ways throughout her books (though her characters do not usually follow traditional Catholic sexual mores) -- and in the intriguing appearance of mysterious figures bringing grace or punishment or inspiration, setting captives free -- human characters, but on some level resembling angels, demons, or, in Spring, explicitly, Saint Brigid -- or a more ancient figure known as Saint Brigid in Christian times. Yet her novels that I have read are not speculative fiction; they are firmly set in the real world. I read this book partly due my love of Ali Smith (based largely around her Seasonal Quartet) but also due to its setting in Norfolk (for interest the culmination of the Seasonal Quartet is also set in Norfolk – Smith herself living nearby in Cambridge, my University town, which also features in this novel). D)ynamic if flawed (.....) It's hard for readers to buy these larger dimensions to Amber, but once we accept that she is a sort of hokey deus ex machina figure -- introduced, in this case, not at the end of the story, but near the beginning -- then it's easy enough to focus on the Smarts and the ways in which their lives are altered by her arrival." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York TimesEve’s head was full of sentences which she’d been practising overnight. Who is to say what authenticity is? Who is to say who owns imagination? Who is to say that my versions, my stories of these individuals’ afterlives, are less true than anyone else’s? She was going to answer every question with a question. This would let her answers seem open, let her seem willing to be discursive, at the same time as be rhetorically cunningly closed." O.K., so she borrowed the plot, such as it is, from a Pasolini movie -- Teorema (1968), with an unforgettable Terence Stamp in the lead role -- and the novel is almost too cleverly constructed, too pleased with its own tidy symmetries. But those are the only quibbles I’ve come up with, so I’ll just blurt it out: Ali Smith’s The Accidental, which two weeks ago won Britain’s Whitbread Novel of the Year award, is a delightful book, a satire that’s playful but not cuddly, tart but not bitter, thoughtful but not heavy." - Adam Begley, The New York Observer I didn't enjoy reading it and to say I found the story a pointless and unrewarding read is probably an understatement. The book seemed to be nothing more than a series of poorly strung together literary devices... or maybe it was a vehicle for the trundling out of a series of literary devices to show how many literary devices there are. Why has Smith chosen Smart as the name of the family in the novel? In what ways are they smart and not so smart?

Astrid's mother, Eve, is supposed to be writing the next in her series of "Genuine Articles", books that relate the lives of people who died in the second world war, but then carry on as though they had lived - which enables Smith to make some nice jokes at the expense of the biography industry. Eve's husband, Michael, is a philandering university teacher of literature; her son Magnus, the least convincingly drawn person, thinks in mathematical terms and has done something terrible at school. One thing I found odd was that “outsider character” Amber was an adult – and I think the subsequent implications for her relationship with Michael did not work well, with Michael’s chapters reading like a teenage fantasy. Smith is stronger I think when her outsider is a child – it is perhaps interesting that the Astrid characters are the strongest here. Interspersed with the episodes on the family are segments told by someone who calls herself Alhambra, named after the movie theater where she was conceived. Her riffs on cinema history and the impact on our culture are marvelous. It seems likely this is Amber, based on what she says she gained from her parents: “ From my mother: grace under pressure; the uses of mystery; how to get what I want. From my father: how to disappear, how not to exist.” The Smart family are dysfunctional. Astrid only views life through her handheld camera, her brother Magnus is suicidal, the half father, lecturer, Michael sleeps with his students and the mother, Eve is a best-selling author who superficial in all ways. Each chapter is about these protagonists and is told through their eyes. Turrentine, Jeff (26 February 2006). "When a Stranger Calls". The Washington Post . Retrieved 19 April 2008.Into this atomised family one day walks Amber, a thirtysomething blonde wastrel with no love of social niceties. She turns up on the doorstep claiming her car has broken down. Michael assumes she has come to interview Eve, while Eve assumes she is one of Michael's student mistresses; somehow Amber ends up staying with them in the rented cottage for several weeks. Everyone falls in love with Amber in a different way. But who is she, and what does she want? Each has different preoccupations -- and often is hiding something from the others (though Amber causes much of that to spill out, one way or another). I can understand why The Accidental is getting a lot of noise. Its a very "writerly" book and very good in that sense. It's written in a stream of consciousness type style, with every chapter representing the internal thoughts of one of the four main characters - Astrid, Magnus, Eve or Michael. Eve is a writer, Astrid and Magnus are her children, and Michael her husband/their stepfather. Smith is especially good at writing the teenagers - it seems that she has absolutely captured the exploration and angst that adolescents go through. The parents are less interesting, because they seem more cliched. Michael is a professor who sleeps with all his students, Eve a writer who is unhappy with her childhood. Both are characters we have seen before (seriously, literary fiction would lead you to believe that every professor sleeps with his student, which really was not the case at either of the institutes of higher learning in which I attended). The children's voice was more fresh to me, and thus their chapters more interesting.

The Accidental is playfully but also sensibly experimental, the different styles and approaches providing texture in a way that makes the story more real than a more straightforward rendering would have. My favorite character is of course Astrid. She is now one of the fictional characters that I will remember for a long time or maybe remember forever. Smith was able to beautifully capture the eccentricities and intensity of a 12-y/o lost character. The only problem with the brilliance of Astrid as a fictional creation is that it rather makes you wish that the whole novel was hers. Which is not to say that the other characters are exactly bland, only that they don't radiate the same sense of discovery. Whitbread (now Costa) Award winning novel and shortlisted for both the Booker and Orange (now Women’s Prize).This story doesn't really (well, I think) do anything subversive with its subject matter, and maybe that's one way in which it actually is subversive, because you don't exactly expect Smith to let the plot run its course in the usual way. There's playful wit, language-bending and experimentation with form, and at least one Chekhov's gun that doesn't go off, but I was disappointed that the story was neither as disruptive as I wanted it to be nor as conclusive as I, then, hoped it would be. Starred Review. So sure-handed are Smith's overlapping descriptions of the same events from different viewpoints that her simple, disquieting story lifts into brilliance." - Publishers Weekly. Written largely in stream-of-consciousness that captures the most subtle emotional fluctuations and self-deceptions, The Accidental is a bracingly original and deeply unsettling tour de force by one of Britain’s rising literary stars. Questions and Topics for Discussion