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    The Accidental
    The Accidental
    The Accidental
    Ebook346 pages4 hours

    The Accidental

    By Ali Smith

    3/5

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    About this ebook

    Filled with the bestselling, award-winning author's trademark wordplay and inventive storytelling, here is the dizzyingly entertaining, wickedly humorous story of a mysterious stranger whose sudden appearance during a family’s summer holiday transforms four variously unhappy people.

    Each of the Smarts—parents Eve and Michael, son Magnus, and the youngest, daughter Astrid—encounter Amber in his or her own solipsistic way, but somehow her presence allows them to see their lives (and their life together) in a new light. Smith’s narrative freedom and exhilarating facility with language propel the novel to its startling, wonderfully enigmatic conclusion.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKnopf Doubleday Publishing Group
    Release dateApr 10, 2007
    ISBN9780307279750
    Author

    Ali Smith

    Ali Smith (Inverness, 1964). Tuvo una madre irlandesa, un padre inglés y una educación escocesa (hasta que comenzó su doctorado en Newnham College, Cambridge). A los veinte años, después de que un debilitante ataque de síndrome de fatiga crónica descarriló su carrera académica, comenzó a escribir. Ahora, autora de ocho novelas y seis colecciones de cuentos, crea lo que podría llamarse ficción experimental, pero con un estilo fácil, agradable y de emocionante lectura. Escribe en The Guardian, The Scotsman y el Times Library Supplement. Actualmente vive en Cambridge. Es la autora de Free Love, Like, Other Stories and Other Stories, Hotel World y el Cuarteto estacional

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    Reviews for The Accidental

    3/5

    811 ratings63 reviews

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    • 4/5
      The technology in "The Accidental" will strike some younger readers and hopefully dated, and apparently the author has gone on to bigger and better things, but this one's still a novel that's well worth picking up. The writing, for one, is top-notch. Bad writers tend to use the same voice to transcribe the thoughts of all of their characters, and middling writers tend to write children as miniature adults. Smith's the rare writer that can give each of her characters -- pre-teen Astrid, moody teenager Magnus, and both of the adults in the Smart household -- voices that are unmistakably their own. Morose, haunted Magnus is beset by guilt while Astrid is in the first throes of thrilling adolescent discovery. Michael Smart is a posh British academic but far from a caricature. Eve frets and drifts, even as she finds herself on the brink of big-time literary fame. Smith never forgets that her characters see and talk about the world differently. Yes, that sounds like a pretty basic task if you're business is writing novels, but it's much harder to pull off than it sounds. By doing this, Smith, to put it bluntly, demonstrates that she's got the touch.

      It would be easy to read "The Accidental" as a story about the fragility of British upper-class life and how one family's existence comes apart when Amber -- mysterious, impulsive, and strangely charismatic -- walks into their lives. But Smith also demonstrates her chops by not tying up all of her loose ends here. Amber's character stubbornly refuses analysis and even identification: we never even learn her last name, or whether or not Amber is indeed her real name. While each of the Smarts come off as a fully formed character, Amber remains, by contrast, entirely unknowable, a blank space that moves purposefully but chaotically through the story. It'd be easy to see her as a mere advantage-taker, and it's quite possible that that is all she is. But readers who go through this one carefully might conclude -- as I did -- that there's just enough about her behavior to call this judgment into question. The psychological needs that Amber satisfies in each member of the Smart family are, in the end, more real than anything we know about Amber herself. I can't help but respect authors who refuse to provide their readers with easy answers, and Smith's far too good a writer to simplify her story for the sake of a tidy ending. This one isn't perhaps, a life-changer, but it was the first novel of Smith's I'd ever read. It left no doubt in my mind that she's the real thing, and I hope that I'll be able to pick up more of her work soon. Recommended.
    • 1/5
      No. This is NOT Literature. Trying to create a story of a problematic family and an enticing, mysterious stranger is all well and good. Describing intercourse with underage boys in horrifyingly heinous sentences, paragraphs, pages is completely UNACCEPTABLE. Throwing pseudo-intellectual, stream-of-consciousness passages is NOT Art. It is porn. And porn is NOT Literature. It is NOT Art. It is a degradation of human existence. It is NOT fashionable or feministic or any kind of "down with the patriarchy" nonsense. Ali Smith has done so much better. This novel is the definition of trash. And one more indication of the dubious criteria that dictate the Booker lists. For shame...Truly. When reviewers shamelessly gush about a novel, they take the writer's life and personal choices into account and pay little to no attention to the material itself. So, let's praise someone we ''like'' despite the fact that their latest work is absolute toilet-paper quality...

      There is nothing ''postmodern'' or ''funny'' in this novel. All I found was a grotesque ugliness and a desperate attempt to appear ''modern'' and ''unique''...I suppose amateur readers who would like to appear ''educated'' and ''It'' may enjoy this. Seasoned readers beg to differ.
    • 3/5
      A for creativity and a unique writing style for sure, but this is just not my kind of book. There are just too many holes left for the reader to fill in and at times I had to re-read sections becuase I was just not connected to what was going on in the story. I appreciate the novel, but would not recommend.
    • 3/5
      A dysfunctional family spends the summer holiday in a rented country house in Norfolk. A woman shows up on their doorstep, saying her car has broken down. Each of the four family members thinks Amber has come to see one of the others, but it is never clear exactly why Amber is there. The most thoroughly developed character is Astrid, the twelve-year-old daughter, who shows growth. The other characters are rather flat, and I did not form any attachment to them. This novel is a mixed bag for me. Some parts held my attention and others seemed meandering and unfocused. This novel is inventive, though, and will appeal to those who enjoy experimental fiction or fans of clever wordplay. Experimental fiction is hit or miss for me. I usually need more of a storyline, which is the case here. I have now read two books by Ali Smith. I preferred Autumn over The Accidental, but I liked it enough to read more of her work.

      3.5
    • 5/5
      Ali Smith is very good at realistic internal monologues. She also seems to always have characters who understand or discover or completely miss what's important in life, and a character or two who is totally alive (even when, as in Hotel World, they're actually dead). She's good at representing how siblings feel about one another. In The Accidental, she illuminates a rather ordinary intellectual family's dysfunction with an "outsider" who is perfectly alive, perfectly honest, perfectly antisocial.
    • 4/5
      Ali Smith is a daring writer who loves to push the boundaries of what writing can be. While reading this novel, there were times when I felt completely in sync with her writing, like she was writing from inside my head. The first chapter was very loosely structured, skipped nimbly from subject to subject, often in partial sentences, and was like how my mind operates, with a stream-of-consciousness quirkiness.

      Then, Smith would pull out of that style abruptly, and I would feel abandoned and not connecting to anything that replaced it. At those times I would find myself actually disliking how her writing made me feel, and I would start to skim the pages, hoping for another transition in style or character. It would have been explainable if I was extremely sleep-deprived or indulging with alcohol or smoke, but that was not happening … this time. This leaves malfunctioning gray matter, or simply the wrong time for this particular book as the cause. Maybe rotating between being inside so many character’s heads was more than I wanted to experience. I’m left not sure about Ali Smith. She absolutely thrills me with her loose and experimental style at times, and then comes very close to boring me a few pages later. It leaves me confused about how she does—all of it.

      Those first pages were so very golden for me, similar to the following review in The New York Observer. “Beautifully executed …. A few pages [in} and you begin to remember how much fun it is to put yourself in the hands of a skilled, majestically confident writer …. Delightful.”

      Her writing continually changes all through this story of the Smart family. The book centers on the family of four: mother Eve is a writer, stepfather Michael is a philandering professor, the son Magnus is 17, and the fascinating, and novel’s most central figure is 12-year-old Astrid. But the driver of so much of the action is Amber, a very free-spirited thirtysomething blonde vagabond who suddenly shows up on their doorstep … possibly because of a broken-down car. Amber is all over the place with every one of the family members, almost like some shapeshifter. These encounters with Amber also cause everyone in the family to look closely at how they related to her and to each other.

      A very telling John Berger quote leads the reader into this curious story. “Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.” There are three sections to the book (The Beginning, The Middle, and The End) and each of the Smarts gets their own part of each section. The reader learns each character’s thoughts, and it makes for an entirely swirling story with all those viewpoints. And in the end, you find yourself wondering what’s it all about, what does Amber really represent in the story, and is it all about how families survive or what tears them apart? I don’t have the answers. Maybe when I reread the book someday, I’ll discover them … maybe not.
    • 3/5
      Astrid Smart is bored. She has been dragged out of school by her parents for a so-called ‘holiday’ in Norfolk, but in reality a break from London to allow her mother to finish her latest book. Her step-father, an academic, is more interested in popping back to London so he can seduce his latest student fling than in anything Astrid is doing. And her elder brother Magnus has not spoken to anyone for weeks and will hardly come out of his room. So Astrid is surprised when she comes downstairs one morning to discover a stranger lying on their sofa. At first her father thinks that her mother has invited the stranger, while her mother assumes the opposite, and by the time the family realise that the woman, Amber, has been invited by no one she has become strangely entangled with each member of the family.

      I usually like Ali Smith but I struggled a little with this one. Divided into three sections (the beginning, the middle and the end) each section is subdivided into the story from the point of view of the four members of the Smart family. This device works well and emphasises the somewhat dysfunctional nature of the family relationships. But the sections are separated by fragments of what sometimes seems to Amber’s story and sometimes Amber reimagining her life as cinema...

      ‘But my father was Alfie, my mother Isadora. I was unnaturally psychic in my teens, I made a boy fall off his bike and I burned down a whole school. My mother was crazy, she was in love with God. There I was at the altar about to marry someone else when my boyfriend hammered on the church glass at the back and we eloped together on a bus. My mother was furious. She’d slept with him too.The devil got me pregnant and a satanic sect made me go through with it. Then I fell in with a couple of outlaws and did me some talking to the sun.’

      It’s quite fun to spot the film, but I have no idea how those sections relate to the rest of the book, or what they mean. And I found reading a book where the beginning and end seem to have no link to the rest of it oddly unsatisfactory...
    • 5/5
      I just finished listening to The Accidental on audio book. Talk about original! It’s the story of the ironically named Smarts: professor Michael, writer Eve, teen bully Magnus, and pre-teen bully victim Astrid. A fifth wheel, Amber, careens into their lives and throws them all for a loop. Each character has a unique voice, not just as a person, but as a literary invention. Eve speaks in question-and-answer interview format like the historical recreations that she writes; Michael speaks an entire chapter in verse; Magnus has an alter ego named “Hologram Boy”; and twelve-year-old Astrid is still seeking a voice, trying out phrases like “typical and ironic” and “i.e.” And Amber speaks in movie allusions, since she was conceived in a cinema.

      It’s an amazing book, as Astrid would say. It addresses not just bullying, but adultery, writer’s block, and the ways in which we are vulnerable to the kind of fraud Amber commits on the whole family. It shines with motifs of light, photography, and cinema. I found it far more complex than The Sea, and the twist at the end has a much more satisfying kick to it. I highly recommend it, and I can’t believe that Banville won the Booker Prize over Smith and Ishiguro. Harumph.
    • 3/5
      This book was very quirky, and there were large parts of it that I really enjoyed... but there were also parts that just seemed totally irrelevant and confusing. I was enjoying it, and then the end happened and now I just don’t know.

      The writing is so good. The family is dysfunctional, but in the way that many are today. I think if I wasn’t so baffled, this would have been a solid pick.
    • 2/5
      Very difficult to read but reveals humour and other treasures at a second attempt.
    • 2/5
      Urg! The Accidental by Ali Smith will not be among my list of favorite books of the year by any means, I really struggled with this one. I felt that although the author’s writing was stellar, the book felt like she was showing the rest of us how intelligent she is and the result felt more like a writing experiment than a novel. I saw one review that called this book original, restless and morally challenging and I would agree with all of that, although to me these were not necessarily compliments.

      Although the story started out interestingly enough, it all too soon descended into a pointless, affected and difficult to read conglomeration of clever words and phrases. At the half way point in the book, I realized that I really didn’t have a clue as to what was going on nor did I care. I did struggle on but I more or less skimmed the last half of the book. The Accidental won many book awards and received gushing reviews from the critics so I am going to assume the fault lies with me and that this was simply too challenging a read for me at this time.
    • 5/5
      Brilliant! A book that expands your understanding of what it means to be human.
    • 3/5
      I am not sure what I thought about this book. I enjoyed parts of it but it wasn't one that I didn't want to put down. I didn't understand how the people changed after meeting Amber. I may giver Ali Smith's other books a try but not positive I will.
    • 4/5
      A family, fractured and potentially disintegrating, takes a holiday home in Norfolk for the summer. Eve is failing to work on her next fictionalized biography. Michael is successfully working on his next meaningless affair at the university. Magnus is dealing with his guilt over the provoked suicide of a girl in his school. Astrid is on the verge of puberty or madness, or both if they aren’t distinguishable. Four isolated and damaged individuals. And each of them will have their lives turned upside down by the arrival Amber. But is she an accidental visitor whose car has run into difficulty, or is she a deliberate intervention? Or is she something altogether extraordinary? Well, that last one is certain though just how far out of the ordinary remains unclear.

      Ali Smith traces Amber’s impact on each of her main characters in turn. And since they each lead such oppressively interior lives, closed off from the light of understanding or shared concern, Amber can be substantially different for each of them. And for each of them, she is just what they need, more or less. She rescues Magnus from his morbid guilty self-concern which risks leading him down the same path as his former classmate. She expands Astrid’s view outward from the narrowing lens of her dv camera into a world of humour and joy. She disdains Michael’s advances but gives him the opportunity to revel in a bit of unrequited lust, for a change. And for Eve? She knocks her on her head and challenges her inauthentic existence.
      Amber’s interactions go through three iterations: beginning, middle, and end. These twelve studies are bracketed by a possible origin story for Amber in a startling procreation exercise at the Alhambra Picture Palace. But what is the connection between the flickering images on the screen, the fictive reality of Eve’s own origins, and the transformative power of accident?

      Fascinating to read, even if I’m not entirely certain that it succeeds as a whole. But certainly recommended.
    • 2/5
      I listened to this book on audio after I had my PRK eye surgery done. The premise looked fascinating, the writing... not so much. Not a fan.

      Completely unmemorable.
    • 3/5
      A story of broken people; Eve the mother who is having writer's block, Michael her second husband who is sleeping with his students, Magnus who is suffering from guilt for his part in teasing. Amber walks into the home where the family is living on a working vacation (for the mother). No one questions her presence and she messes with all of their minds. The problem of poor communication allows this stranger to insert herself into their life. I didn't like the story much but was intrigued by the story idea. There was too much gutter talk in the dialogue which is probably stream of conscious. There is a lot of pornography reference and even too much pornography description which I think could have been omitted and still got the idea across.
    • 1/5
      I quite simply found it to be a waste of my time. An exercise, not a novel. Annoying characters, a thoroughly ridiculous need for suspended disbelief, and no substance beyond the formal 'inventiveness' left me wanting a LOT more. I didn't hate it - but I certainly did not like it and found it to've been a waste of my time. I'll not be reading another of Ms. Smith's books, that's for sure.
    • 2/5
      Well then....I will start with the good (it won't take long.) This book is beautifully written. This is an important point and it is the reason this is a 2 rather than a 1 star review. I often have a strong desire to hunt down writers and beat them about the head and neck with a hardcover copy of Elements of Style. This desire (for which I guess I should seek treatment) did not rear its head with The Accidental. Ali Smith's prose is dazzling. There are brief moments where it is so good that the writing itself produces a little thrill. Unfortunately there are no moments, none at all, where the characters or the story produce even the merest hint of excitement. Even good writing can't substitute for a lack of content.

      I am a fairly fast reader, but it took months for me to finish this book. I would put it down for a week, pick it up, and feel the sort of dread I have not felt since 12th grade AP English forced upon me Silas Marner. But as I did with Silas, I plodded through this empty wasteland. There are 5 characters in the book, and there is no way I could have cared less about any of them. I mean that in the literal sense. I did not hate or even dislike these characters because they inspired no feelings at all. Many things occur, but the author stays so detached from the events, and the characters experiencing events are so passive, that rather than being interesting they serve as nothing but symbols. (The loss of virginity by molestation, the bully's feelings when he bullies someone into suicide, the loss of all one's possessions through theft, the passive "decision" to invite strangers into your life and then allowing them to manipulate and abuse you and all your family members, all potentially meaty events.) All are here to illustrate that disasters, unplanned events, are the best things that can happen to us as humans if we get over our preconceptions and allow ourselves to accept Ms. Smith's preconceptions in their place.

      I am rarely sorry when I soldier through a difficult book, but I lament my lost time here. The Accidental is a lot of work for no payoff, the very definition of form over substance. Given how spectacularly good the author is at the craft of writing I will keep a bead on her to see if she ever finds fiction's soul. If that happens it will be one hell of a book.
    • 4/5
      I liked this book...but not as much as Hotel World. Part of me thinks it went on too long...but I like how Smith is playful with words and kind of teases the reader. She's interesting. But I recommend Hotel World before this one.
    • 2/5
      I will remember the book solely because of the literary devices used, imagination that comes through writing. Otherwise book wasn't particularly entertaining, something I am looking for when I read fiction. Ali Smith has divided book into three parts: The Beginning, The Middle and The End. In each part, there is a lesson from POV of each character. All characters are members of a western dysfunctional family with their individual issues. Mother is a writer, stepfather a Literature lecturer, and two kids Magnus and Astrid.

      One summer, a woman named Amber enters their lives and influences each other in her own way. This is very reminiscent of the movie 'The Page Turner' where the a girl turns up at the house of a recovering musician and assimilates in the family. The similarity sort of ends in the third part. Though Amber is a stranger, a swindler, she somehow helps each of them understand themselves and leaves an impression on each of them.

      The POV of Amber were sort of hard for me to decipher; I wondered about the intent. These chapters were amalgam of all pop cultures and bit strange. There were references to Hollywood, songs and movie directors. There was Sound of Music's story, even Mary Poppins and a reference to butter scene in Last Tango in Paris.
    • 4/5
      A truly original and clever written book with a lot of genres interwoven in different storylines. This is real arresting storytelling. The story centers around the Smart family ( Literature professor Michael ,historical fiction writer Eve (42), Astrid (12), Magnus (17), who are during a hot summer, on holiday in a holiday home in Norfolk. One day an appealing and beautiful strange young woman, called Amber (30 something), appears at their doorstep. Her car is broken, but apparently the family members think that she has come on an appointment. Amber is a real strong character with her own laws which she follows strictly. Soon she steps over family boundaries which leads to developments and complications, sometimes hillarious and sometimes grim. But it also brings the Smart family members to an understanding of themselves. The book opens with this great sentence: "My mother began me one evening in 1968 on a table in the café of the town's only cinema". And how interesting, at page 205 I read the wonderful history of cinema that started with the invention of the Lumière brothers: "a wooden box with an eye". Rich in different stories and experimental styles.
    • 3/5
      Eve and Michael Smart, and their children Magnus and Astrid, rent a house in Norfolk for the summer, hoping to escape the stress of everyday London life. One day a young woman named Amber appears on their doorstep, and everyone is so caught up in their own cares, each assumes she is known to one of the others. Astrid thinks she's a friend of Eve's; Eve thinks she's one of Michael's university students, etc. Amber stays for dinner, and spends the night, albeit in her car. Time passes and before you know it, Amber is firmly entrenched in their lives. She's a dubious role model and mentor to 12-year-old Amber, the object of 17-year-old Magnus' passion, and the one woman Michael wants but can't manage to seduce. Amber also becomes privy to several deep family secrets, some shared with her directly and others obtained through her powers of reason.

      It's all very strange, because she's not particularly likeable. You'd think one of the parents would kick her out, but every member of the family is so locked inside their own head that no one understands the effect she's having on them collectively. As Amber inserts herself into the family, she shares remarkably little about herself, and yet manages to get everyone else to let their guard down. Each family member has the chance to tell their version of the story, taking turns as narrator, which enables the reader to get just as deep into each person's psyche as Amber does. Ali Smith used very different writing styles and techniques for each character, underscoring the differences between family members. On the other hand, Amber's chapters are decidedly sparse, so as readers our understanding of her is just as limited as the family's.

      I was initially intrigued by Smith's quirky writing, but eventually tired of it. The story seemed about equal parts positive and creepy. Only when the family returns to London does the full impact of Amber's visit become clear, and the whole thing struck me as quite creepy indeed. And while this book gave me some interesting thoughts to ponder, I was left wishing some of the family relationships and related themes were further developed.
    • 4/5
      Admirable, but mostly for the writing style and narrative experiments. As always, there are times Smith can almost take your breath away.

      The novel can be briefly described as what happens to a family of four when a stranger arrives unexpectedly and is somehow invited to stay in their home.

      Smith creates one fantastic and appealing character in 12-year-old Astrid Smart, but she is such a wonderful creation that the book deflates a bit each time the narrative shifts to the point of view of her family members, who to varying degrees veer between self-indulgent and sympathetic. Least successful of all, to my mind, is the character of the stranger, called Amber. Amber is a cypher, but perhaps not enough of one, as she has a confusing backstory.

      As a novel, "The Accidental" can't really live up to the wonderful "There But For The." But the two works are something of a piece, and "The Accidental" is well worth reading if you are a Smith fan.
    • 3/5
      This book started off intriguingly enough, told in a very distinctive voice we soon learn belongs to Astrid, a 12-year-old on holiday with her family in a "substandard" vacation rental. She's precocious and quirky, but child narrators pretty much have to be. Then the focus bounces back and forth between Astrid, her mother (Eve), her brother (Magnus), and her stepfather (MIchael). This method of storytelling can be very effective to help the reader understand what 's going on from multiple points of view, or to give some insight into characters' motivations. However, Eve and Michael don't really have much to add. Eve is a writer with a block and not really much of a personality beyond that, while Michael is a philandering professor who seems to only think of sex (but not with any real enthusiasm).

      The action (if you can call it that) happens when an unknown woman named Amber happens into their household and stays because both Eve and Michael think she must have something to do with the other one, but everyone is too polite to ask at first. By the time they realize it, Amber has ingratiated herself into the family and stays until they begin to feel that she's not charmingly blunt but instead relentlessly cruel. The interactions between Astrid and Amber were the most believable and affecting. Amber's pseudo-showdown with Eve would have been something if Eve had any more texture to her than damp cardboard. Some odd stylistic choices and segues distracted from the storytelling (Michael tells a whole chapter in verse - I skimmed it; another entire chapter is made up of a sort of stream-of-consciousness mashup of movie plots - I skipped it).

      Summary: I enjoyed about half of it, was disinterested in about a quarter of it, and completely hated about a quarter of it.

      One quote from the book that caught my eye: "There are things that can't be said because it is hard to have to know them. There are things you can't get away from after you know them."
    • 3/5
      I'm not really sure what to think about The Accidental. The story was pretty uneven for me. Some parts were captivating and other parts were downright boring and I wanted to skip over them.

      The story is told through each of the four members of the Smart family - mom Eve, dad Michael, older brother Magnus, younger sister Astrid. The best chapters were definitely the ones told by the kids. Magnus' teen angst and depression over thinking he caused the suicide of a classmate and Astrid's preteen randomness of thought were compelling and amusing, respectfully. The chapters told by the parents were so much middle aged rambling. The pieces of the story from Amber, the young woman who crashes the family's summer home, were odd.

      Amber shows up at the summer house and just walks in when the door is opened to her saying her car is broken down just down the road. Michael assumes she is there for Eve because she acts like she belongs. Eve assumes Michael invited her when she meets her later. Neither confirms with the other, so Amber stays, hangs out with the kids separately, taking them on a series of secret adventures which the parents would have freaked over if they knew about them. The parents are uncomfortable with her but neither says anything until Eve throws her out. The novel is about how Amber affects each member of the family differently and the aftermath of her being in their lives for the summer.

      Not sure if I recommend the book, but I can't not recommend it, either. I guess it's one of those things you have to read for yourself and decide.
    • 2/5
      Reasonably successful writer Eve Smart, her philandering lecturer husband Michael and their family are renting a house in Norfolk when they are intruded upon by a female stranger called Amber, who proceeds to inveigle her way into their home, befriend Eve’s twelve year old daughter Astrid and seduce her teenage son Magnus.

      The novel is split into three sections, The Beginning, The Middle and The End in all of which each family member has a narrative strand. Astrid’s narration is initially irritating as she has a habit of using ie (or even id est) in circumstances which do not warrant it. Thankfully, she - or Smith as the author - grows out of this by The End. Each section is preceded, and hence followed, by a framing narrative in the first person from Amber’s viewpoint. (This does not illumine Amber’s behaviour overmuch.) The unravelling of the Smart family’s life under Amber’s influence is the meat of the book.

      There are several infelicities. Not only are a couple of characters unsympathetic but the changes of viewpoint initially jar and for a long time the lack of justification in the text irritated me. The ragged right hand margin was too much of a distraction. By The End, though, the characters (apart from Amber) are more established and these concerns fade.
    • 3/5
      Find Ali Smith quite difficult to read, but persevered and occaisionally skipped a few bits too dreamlike and seemingly not connected to the plot. It is a tale of a girl/woman Amber turning up at the holiday home of a family and interacting with each member in a fairly bizarre way. Don't think it was ever explained why. Unless it was supposed to be omniscient justice. Made me think of "an inspector calls", though it was not as structured.
    • 4/5
      I'm not quite sure what I made of this. It's quite a "literary" book, and so takes a bit of time to get into. Each chapter is a stream of consciousness coming from one of the four main characters, so can get quite caught up in their lives. I wasn't sure it was something I wanted to get caught up in though. However I stuck it out to the end, which I found quite satisfying - both the end, and the journey.
    • 3/5
      This is listed in 1001 book to read, so I read it. Although well written and easy enough to read, it is slow going as it is slow and boring. The plot doesn't go anywhere and the characters are not compelling enough to care about.
    • 1/5
      This is one of the few books I have been unable to complete. I just could not get into it, I could not not connect with the characters and did not really see where the book was going.

    Book preview

    The Accidental - Ali Smith

    The beginning

    of things–when is it exactly? Astrid Smart wants to know. (Astrid Smart. Astrid Berenski. Astrid Smart. Astrid Berenski.) 5.04 a.m. on the substandard clock radio. Because why do people always say the day starts now? Really it starts in the middle of the night at a fraction of a second past midnight. But it’s not supposed to have begun until the dawn, really the dark is still last night and it isn’t morning till the light, though actually it was morning as soon as it was even a fraction of a second past twelve i.e. that experiment where you divide something down and down like the distance between the ground and a ball that’s been bounced on it so that it can be proved, Magnus says, that the ball never actually touches the ground. Which is junk because of course it touches the ground, otherwise how would it bounce, it wouldn’t have anything to bounce off, but it can actually be proved by science that it doesn’t.

    Astrid is taping dawns. There is nothing else to do here. The village is a dump. Post office, vandalized Indian restaurant, chip shop, little shop place that’s never open, place for ducks to cross the road. Ducks actually have their own roadsign! There is a sofa warehouse called Sofa So Good. It is dismal. There is a church. The church has its own roadsign too. Nothing happens here except a church and some ducks, and this house is an ultimate dump. It is substandard. Nothing is going to happen here all substandard summer.

    She now has nine dawns one after the other on the mini dv tape in her Sony digital. Thursday 10 July 2003, Friday 11 July 2003, Saturday 12, Sunday 13, Monday 14, Tuesday 15, Wednesday 16, Thursday 17 and today Friday 18. But it is hard to know what moment exactly dawn is. All there is when you look at it on the camera screen is the view of outside getting more visible. So does this mean that the beginning is something to do with being able to see? That the day begins as soon as you wake up and open your eyes? So when Magnus finally wakes up in the afternoon and they can hear him moving about in the room that’s his in this dump of a substandard house, does that mean the day is still beginning? Is the beginning different for everyone? Or do beginnings just keep stretching on forwards and forwards all day? Or maybe it is back and back they stretch. Because every time you open your eyes there was a time before that when you closed them then a different time before that when you opened them, all the way back, through all the sleeping and the waking and the ordinary things like blinking, to the first time you ever open your eyes, which is probably round about the moment you are born.

    Astrid kicks her trainers off on to the floor. She slides back across the horrible bed. Or possibly the beginning is even further back than that, when you are in the womb or whatever it’s called. Possibly the real beginning is when you are just forming into a person and for the first time the soft stuff that makes your eyes is actually made, formed, inside the hard stuff that becomes your head i.e. your skull.

    She fingers the curve of bone above her left eye. Eyes fit the space they are in, exactly like they were made for each other, the space and the eye. Like the play she saw with the man in it whose eyes were gouged out, the people on the stage turned him so the audience couldn’t see, then they gouged out his eyes then whirled the chair round and he had his hands up at his face and he took them away, his hands were full of red stuff, it was all round his eye sockets. It was insane. It was jelly or something similar. It was his daughters who did it or his sons. It was one of Michael’s tragedies. It was quite good though. Yes, exactly, because at a theatre the curtain goes up and you know it’s the beginning because, obviously, the curtain’s gone up. But the way the lights go down, the audience goes quiet, and right after the curtain goes up, then the air, if you’re sitting near the stage, you can actually smell a different other air with bits of dust and stuff in it moving. Like when Michael and her mother made her go to the other tragedy that was completely insane about the woman who loses it and kills her children, but before she does she sends them, two boys, really small boys, off the stage, they actually come down into the audience and walk through it, the mother has given them poisoned clothes etc. to give to the princess their father is marrying instead of her and they go to a house or a palace somewhere behind the audience, this doesn’t happen on the stage, it doesn’t happen anywhere except in the story i.e. in your head but even though you know it doesn’t, you know it’s just a play, even so, somewhere behind you the princess is still putting on the poisoned things and dying a horrible death. Her eyes melt in their sockets and she comes out in a rash like if terrorists dropped spores on the Tube. Her lungs melt and

    Astrid yawns. She is hungry.

    She is starving, actually.

    It is literally hours till anything like breakfast even if she wanted to eat anything in this unhygienic dump.

    She could go back to sleep. But typical and ironic, she is completely awake. It is completely light outside now; you can see for miles. Except there is nothing to see here; trees and fields and that kind of thing.

    5.16 a.m. on the substandard clock radio.

    She is really awake.

    She could get up and go and film the vandalism. She is definitely going to do it today. She will go to the restaurant later and ask the Indian man if it is okay to. Or maybe she will just film it without him knowing in case he says no. If she went right now there would be nobody there and she could just do it. If anybody happened to be up and around at this time of the morning (nobody will, there is nobody awake for miles but her, but if there were, say there were) they would just think oh, look, there is a twelve-year-old girl playing with a dv camera. They would probably notice what a good model the camera is, that’s if they knew anything about cameras. She would tell them if they asked that she is a visitor for the summer (true) filming the scenery (true) or that it is for a school project (could be true) about different buildings and their uses (quite good). And then maybe there will be vital evidence on her mini dv tape when she gets home and at some point in the investigation into the vandalism someone in authority will remember and say oh that twelve-year-old girl was there with a camera, maybe she recorded something really what is the word crucial to our enquiries, and they will come and knock on the door, but what if they aren’t still here for the summer, what if they’ve already gone home, some investigations take quite a long time, well then the authorities will trace her back home with their computers by looking up Michael’s name or by asking the people who own this substandard house and, because of her, things will finally be put right and a mystery like who is responsible for the vandalism at the Curry Palace will actually be solved.

    This is a quintessential place. Her mother keeps saying so, she says it every evening. There don’t seem to be many other people here on holiday regardless of how quintessential it is, maybe because it’s not actually holiday time yet, officially. People in the village do a lot of staring even when Astrid isn’t doing anything, is just walking about. Even when she isn’t using her camera. But it is nice weather. She is lucky not to be at school. The sun has come out on most of the dawns she has recorded. This is what a good summer is like. In the past, before she was born, the summers were better, they were perpetual beautiful summers from May to October in the past apparently. The past is a different century. She herself will probably be the one to live longest into the new century out of all the people here in this house right now, her mother, Magnus, herself, Michael. They are all more part of the old century than she is. But then again her whole life, mostly, was lived in the old century. But then again their whole lives were too, and percentage-wise she has already lived 25 per cent of hers in the new (if you start at 2001 and allow for the next six months of this year now to have already happened). She herself is 25 per cent new, 75 per cent old. Magnus has lived three out of seventeen in it so comes out at. Astrid works it out. Magnus is 17ish per cent new, 83 per cent old. She is 8 per cent more in the new than Magnus. Her mother and Michael are way out there on a much much more significantly small percentage in the new, a much much more significantly large percentage in the old. She will work it out later. She can’t be bothered now.

    She shifts on the substandard bed. The substandard bed creaks loudly. After the creak she can hear the silence in the rest of the house. They are all asleep. Nobody knows she is awake. Nobody is any the wiser. Any the wiser sounds like a character from ancient history. Astrid in the year 1003 BC (Before Celebrity) goes to the woods where Any the Wiser, who is really royalty and a king but who has unexpectedly chosen to be a Nobody and to live the simple life, lives in a hut, no, a cave, and answers the questions that the people of the commonweal come for miles around to ask him (most probably a him since if it was a her she’d have to be in a convent or burnt). People who want to know answers to things have to knock on the door of the cave, well, the rock outside, she picks up a rock and knocks it against another rock, this lets Any the Wiser know that someone is waiting. I brought an offering, Astrid calls into the dark of the cave. She has brought an offering of croissants. You probably can’t get good croissants in the woods, like you can’t get them out here. Both Michael and her mother have been complaining about no croissants since they got to this substandard village which is typical and ironic since they’re the ones who wanted to come here and have made her and Magnus come and made her even more weird and unlike everybody is supposed to be than she already is, though with any luck by the time school starts again in September Lorna Rose and Zelda Howe and Rebecca Callow will have forgotten about her being taken out of school early two months before.

    Astrid concentrates them out of her head. She is at the door of a cave. She is carrying croissants. Any the Wiser is delighted. He nods at Astrid to come forward.

    He glints at her through the darkness of the cave; he is old and wise; he has a fatherly look in his eye. Answer my question, oh revered sage and oracle, Astrid begins.

    But that’s all she can say because she doesn’t have a question. She doesn’t know what to ask him about, or for. She can’t think of a question, not one she’s allowed to say inside herself in actual words to herself, never mind out loud to a complete stranger, even a stranger she’s made up.

    (Astrid Smart. Astrid Berenski.)

    She sits up. She picks up her camera, turns it over in her hand. She shuts its screen away, ejects the beginnings tape, slides it into its little case and puts it on the table. She clips the non-beginnings tape into the camera instead. She lies on her back then shifts over on to her front. By the end of their time here she will have sixty-one beginnings, depending on if they go home on the Friday, the Saturday or the Sunday. Sixty-one minus nine, i.e. still at least fifty-two more to go. Astrid sighs. Her sigh sounds too loud. There is no noise of traffic here. It is probably the fact that there is no noise that is keeping her so awake. She is completely awake. In a minute she will go and film the vandalism. She closes her eyes. She is on the inside of a hazelnut; she fits against the shell perfectly, as if she was born in it. Her head has it as a helmet. It fits the curve of her knees. It is completely enclosed. It is a complete room. It is completely safe. Nobody else can get inside it. Then she worries about what she will do about breathing, since the nut is completely sealed. She begins to worry about how she is doing any breathing now. There is obviously a finite amount of air, if any, inside a hazelnut. Then she begins to worry that Lorna Rose and Zelda Howe and Rebecca, if they were ever to find out she had ever had a thought like that she was inside a hazelnut, would think she was even more laughable and a mental case. Lorna Rose and Zelda Howe are playing a game of tennis on a public court in a park. Astrid walks past with Rebecca. Rebecca and Astrid are still friends. Lorna Rose runs across to the fence and tells Astrid and Rebecca they should come and play on the court next to the one she and Zelda Howe are playing on, and then the winners of each game will play each other to find who out of the four of them is the best. Astrid looks at the court she and Rebecca are supposed to play on. Its surface is all pieces of broken glass. She is about to say no but Rebecca says yes. But look at the glass, Astrid says because it is insane. Coward, Zelda Howe says. We knew you wouldn’t do it. They have put the broken glass there on purpose as a test. If you want to play on broken glass you’re an idiot, Astrid tells Rebecca. Rebecca goes into the court and crunches about on the broken glass. A man comes. He is one of their fathers. She is going to tell him about the glass but before she can he calls everyone except her over to the fence and breaks a Cadburys fruit and nut bar into four equal pieces. He gives a piece to each of them. She looks to see if he’s eating the fourth piece himself but she can’t make out his face, he is too far away. There is something in her hand. It is her camera. If she can get this on film she will be able to show someone everything that’s happening. But she can’t lift the camera. It is too heavy. Her arm won’t work. A doorbell rings, miles away. It is at home. There is no one at home but her. The hall is as big and empty as a desert. Astrid runs along it to answer the door. The hall seems never to end. When she does get to the door she is doubled over, she has run out of breath and she is frightened that whoever is behind it will have gone by now because she took so long. She opens it. A man is standing there. He has no face. He has no nose, no eyes, nothing, just blank skin. Astrid is terrified. Her mother will be furious with her. It is her fault he is here. You can’t come in, she tries to tell him, but she has no breath. We’re not here, she breathes. We’re on holiday. Go away. She tries to shut the door. A mouth appears in the skin and a great noise roars out of it like she is standing too close to an aeroplane. It forces the door back. She opens her eyes, rolls straight off the bed on to her feet.

    She is on holiday in Norfolk. The substandard clock radio says 10.27 a.m. The noise is Katrina the Cleaner thumping the hoover against the skirting boards and the bedroom doors.

    Her hand is asleep. It is still hooked through the handstrap of the camera. She unhooks it and shakes it to get the blood back into it.

    She puts her feet on top of her trainers and slides them across the substandard carpet. It has had the bare naked feet of who knows how many hundreds of dead or old people on it.

    When she looks in the mirror above the sink she sees the imprint of her own thumb below her cheekbone where she slept on her hand ! ! She is like the kind of pottery things her mother buys that have been made by real people (not factories), actual artisans working in hot countries who leave the actual marks of their hands in it as their signature i.e. she has signed herself in her sleep!

    She presses her thumb into the indentation it made. It fits perfectly.

    She flicks water over her face and dries it on the sleeve of her t-shirt rather than the horrible towel. She pulls her trainers on properly. She picks up the camera again and lifts the latch on the door.

    There are two ways to watch what you’re filming: 1. on the little screen and 2. through the viewer. Real filmmakers always use the viewer though it is harder to see with it. She puts her eye to the viewer and records her hand making the latch go up then down. In a hundred years’ time these latches may not exist any more and this film will be proof that they did and will act as evidence for people who need to know in the future how latches like this one worked.

    The battery sign is flashing. The battery is low. There is enough power to record Katrina the Cleaner gouging with the hoover tube at the inside of each stair. Katrina is something to do with the house. She comes with the package. Her mother and Michael have a joke they whisper when she’s round a corner out of earshot, or even when she’s not in the house and wouldn’t hear even if they shouted it, Katrina the Cleaner in her Ford Cortina. The Ford Cortina is a car from the 1970s; it is probably an oik car, though Astrid doesn’t get the joke; Katrina doesn’t actually seem to have a car; she carries the cleaning stuff along the road to the house from her own house in the village then carries it back again when she’s finished. They always act so juvenile as if they are being really the worst they can be, saying something really risky. Personally Astrid is above such things. People are just different from other people, is what she thinks. It is obvious. Some people are naturally not as suited to living the same way as other people, so they make less money and live a different, less good kind of life.

    There isn’t much light on the stairs. It will be quite an interesting effect. She watches the top of Katrina’s head through the viewer. She films her cleaning the stair. Then she films her as she moves down and cleans the next.

    Katrina the Cleaner shifts to one side, not looking up, to let Astrid pass.

    Excuse me, Katrina, Astrid shouts politely. Can I just ask you something?

    Katrina the Cleaner bends away from Astrid and switches the hoover off. She doesn’t look up.

    Can I just ask you how old you are? Astrid says. It’s for my local researches and archive. (This sounds good. Astrid tries to memorize it so she can use it to the Indian man at the Curry Palace.)

    Katrina the Cleaner says something downwards. It sounds like thirty-one. She definitely looks that old. She has switched the hoover back on again. Thirty-one is tricky. Astrid rounds it down. 10 per cent new, 90 per cent old. She films all the way round Katrina then films her own feet going down the rest of the stairs.

    This footage will come straight after the dead thing she taped on the road when she was walking back from the village last night. It was a bit like a rabbit but it wasn’t a rabbit. It was bigger than a rabbit. It had small ears and smaller back legs; it had been mangled by cars; its fur was matted with mud and blood. Four or five crows rose off it when she went towards it; they had been pulling scraps off it. She had found a stick on the verge and poked it with it. Then she had filmed it. At some point she is going to leave the camera on the table in the substandard lounge at exactly the right place on the tape and Michael will definitely pickit up and look at what’s on it, he is bound to, and he is such a loser he is really squeamish about things like that if they are happening in real life and not like on a stage or whatever.

    She stops, stands in the hall. The dead thing. What if it was alive but unconscious and she had poked it that hard and it wasn’t dead at all, it could still feel her poking it and only seemed dead because it was in a coma?

    Well but maybe it would be okay because maybe if it was in a coma it wouldn’t have felt it so much as it would have if it had been awake. In the four-wheel drive on the way here her mother and Michael did their usual Peep for Sheep game where Michael hits the horn whenever they pass sheep and they did their usual clenched fists in the air that they do whenever the car passes roadkill. It is supposed to honour the spirit of the dead thing. It is juvenile. Astrid liked it when she used to be upset by the dead things. But now she is twelve and they are just dead things for God’s sake.

    It is very unlikely that it felt anything when she poked it.

    She poked it for her researches and archive.

    Astrid puts her eye back behind the camera. Also it is important to look closely at things, especially difficult things. Astrid’s mother is always saying so. Astrid goes through the dark hall and into the front room. But the camera viewer floods with light so bright that she can’t see. She has to look away from it quick.

    She blinks. It was so bright it was almost sore.

    There is the shape of someone on the sofa by the window. Because of the light from the window behind the person, and because of the flash of light still filling her own eye with reds and blacks, the face is a blur of light and dark. Astrid looks down at the carpet until her sight comes back. She can see bare feet.

    It will be someone to do with the house, an oik from the village. It will be one of Michael’s students. Astrid blinks again and turns her back. She ignores that side of the room. She switches off her camera very attentively and collects the charger and the other battery from behind the horrible old paperbacks in the bookcase thing. She carries them through to the kitchen.

    Michael is peeling a pear on to a plate. The plate has been used hundreds of times by who knows how many people who have been in this house. He is peeling the pear with a knife which has a wooden handle. The wood of that handle has all the dirty washing-up water of all the times it has ever been washed by the hundreds of dead old people who lived here or holidayed here seeped into it.

    The toaster also has old other people’s crumbs in it. Astrid puts her camera stuff down by the chair, unrolls some kitchen foil and breaks a piece of bread off the uncut end of the loaf. She covers the substandard grillpan with the foil and lays the bread under the grill, which she lights. Then she sits on the chair by the door, swinging her legs.

    Who’s the person in the front room? she asks Michael who is cutting the pear into neat white slices.

    Something to do with your mother, Michael says. Her car broke down.

    He takes the plate with the pear on it and goes through to the front, humming a tune. He is humming that Beyoncé song. He thinks he is so now, i.e. he is completely embarrassing.

    Astrid knocks her hand against the side of the chair to see if it will hurt. It does, but not very much. She knocks it again, harder. It hurts more. Of course science can prove, typical and ironic, that her hand is not actually hitting the chair by dividing down the distance smaller and smaller. She hits it again. Ow.

    She waits for the bread to singe a bit.

    She can hear Michael in the

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