The Accidental (2005)
Anyone spot the deliberate mistake on the cover text?
Why this one?
I really loved How to be both, Smith’s 2015 Women’s Prize winner, and this one ticks all the boxes as a multiple prize winner, as well as having been a ‘vanquished foe’ to the winners of both the Booker and Women’s Prizes.
Ali Smith (1962- ; active 1986- ), was born in Inverness, Scotland to working-class parents. She studied English Language & Literature at the University of Aberdeen and then began a PhD in American and Irish modernism at Cambridge. During this time she began writing plays and so did not complete her doctorate. In the late eighties she regularly had plays performed at the Edinburgh Fringe, before focusing more attention on prose, with her first book of shorts, Free Love and Other Stories, published in 1995.
Her first novel was 1997's Like, which she followed with Hotel World in 2001. The latter was shortlisted for both the 2001 Booker (losing out to Peter Carey's slightly annoying True History of the Kelly Gang) and the same year's Women's Prize (won by the rather lovely The Idea of Perfection.) She repeated the same feat with 2005's The Accidental (this time pipped by John Banville’s surprise winner The Sea and Zadie Smith's On Beauty respectively) - though it won the Costa (then Whitbread) novel prize. How to Be Both, her seventh novel, won the Goldsmiths Prize and Costa (again) in 2014 before taking the 2015 Women's Prize. She has since written four seasonal 'state of the nation' works beginning with 2016's Autumn (also Booker shortlisted) which was written in the immediate aftermath of the UK's 2016 Brexit referendum.
Thoughts, etc.
The Accidental takes place mainly in a sleepy village in Norfolk, where a middle class family from Islington, London are spending their summer. Eve Smart is the family’s mother, and a novelist who draws on real-life stories for her fiction, and is currently suffering from writer’s block. Her partner is Michael, also a writer and a university professor in London, who is prone to infidelity with his students. Eve’s daughters from a previous marriage (to an Adam, no less) are Astrid, a 12 year old girl with a love for photography and a delightful way with words, and Magnus, an older teenager with a scientific mind and a serious (and justified) sense of guilt hanging over him over an incident that happened before the holidays.
Into this mix slips the mysterious Amber, a 30-year-old who exerts a magnetic pull on the family, while simultaneously setting off metaphorical firebombs left, right and centre. She arrives seemingly out of nowhere: Michael thinks she’s an interviewee for one of Eve’s upcoming books; Eve thinks she’s one of Michael’s students / bits on the side; the children barely question her arrival. She seems to be known to the house’s cleaner, and to all of the local “Village People” as the family condescendingly refer to them. None of the Smarts seem inclined to dig any deeper (her magnetic personality seems to repel knowledge as much as it attracts interest), so she’s able to work her way into their lives with relatively little effort.
Amber is absolutely a fascinating character in herself, attractively nihilistic and unpredictable. But she’s largely a narrative trick, a device to be thrown - grenade-like - into the midst of a complacent and self-obsessed bourgeois family and to challenge each member’s assumptions. An ‘accidental’ obviously in the musical sense, a symbol that through its presence slightly adjusts the ‘notes’ of the family members to something either elevated or reduced. Each character is entranced by her in one way or another - to Astrid she offers maturity and freedom; to Magnus - the same, albeit in a more phallocentric version; to Eve - the promise of self-knowledge and an unlocking of creative block; and to Michael - a realisation that not everything can be ‘had’ and therefore a dive into soul-searching reinvention. Where she leaves them is even more interesting and open to interpretation - especially in the case of Eve who seems to end the book beginning a new cycle, taking on Amber’s mantle after the latter disappears.
I for one would love to read a sequel that looks at what Eve does next! This was a brilliant, sparky book with both immediate rewards in its vibrant language and shocking moments, and longer-term thought-starters that I’ll be pondering long after this read. Even more than an Eve-centric sequel, though, I wish we could hear more from Astrid. Even without Amber’s tweaking, she’s a brilliantly well-written child character, with a language of her own that is believable - neither patronising nor impossibly mature - and a humorous penchant for learning new words and phrases and repeating them (i.e.) ad infinitum. As she says at one point in this book, very firmly routed as it is in the specific world of the early 2000s, ‘this century is mine’ - I’d love to know what the 30-something Astrid makes of 2024!
If there was one slight let-down for me (and it’s very slight) it was in the relative elusiveness of the Amber character. Compared to the four family members, she has only a handful of brief pages to her own narrative, which are largely taken up by various histories of the word Alhambra (apparently her real name, given for a cinema which features heavily in those sections) - she’s obviously there as an enigma, an abstraction rather than a fully formed person. We learn that from her father she learned ‘how to disappear, how to not exist’ right at the start of the novel. She’s tied to the cinema, and part of a cinematic history (many mention Pasolini) of strangers wreaking havoc on bourgeois families. The slight shame is that she’s actually (perhaps Astrid aside) by some distance the most electric character in the book. Perhaps her elusiveness is part of the charm, though?
Score
9
Brilliant stuff again. If not quite as revolutionary and awe-inspiring a How to be both, it’s still absolutely stunning. I’m somewhat surprised that it managed to pick up the Costa Prize - I’d always assumed that that Prize went a little ‘safer’ and more mainstream than some of the others. Should I be checking out more winners of that now sadly departed award?
Next up
We’re getting very close to the 2024 Women’s Prize longlist announcement, but I’m hoping to squeeze one more in before I get onto that… maybe?
