Books of the Month

'The Accidental' by Ali Smith

MARCH 2006

Ali Smith has made fragmented narratives her speciality, and even from the cover of her latest novel you can tell The Accidental will be true to form. Like Hotel World, Smith’s Booker-shortlisted last novel, this story (also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and winner of the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award) is told in several voices.

Meet the Smart family, spending their summer holiday in a less than satisfactory holiday home in Norfolk. Daughter Astrid is twelve, incessantly filming seemingly abstract activity on her Sony videocam. Son Magnus keeps to his room, depressed about his part in a school tragedy. Stepfather Michael is a university academic seemingly on top of everything, while mother Eve is struggling to write the latest of her fictive histories in a shed (marketed as a summerhouse) in the garden. Into the lives of this family one day, quite randomly, comes Amber. For the first twenty four hours Eve thinks she is one of Michael’s students, and Michael assumes she is something to do with Eve. By the time the penny drops, Amber has already begun to work her magic on each individual member of the family, and so is allowed to stay. The book describes how her presence, and her varying responses to each person (from sexual initiation through disregard to outright hostility) change each of the characters in significant ways. At the end we are left with a puzzle: was Amber a supremely gifted con artist, skilled at ingratiating herself into the lives and hospitality of strangers, or was she a mysterious but positive force, ironing out their problems and rearranging the relationships between them – for the better?

Of course, that's something you have to work out for yourself. If you've read the book, and have an opinion, why not email in your own review? It's easy to do - just click this link to take you to the book, and go to 'Write a Review of this book'.

Susan Tranter

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