Product Description

The Smart family's lacklustre holiday in Norwich is turned upside down when a beguiling stranger called Amber appears, bringing with her love, joy, pain and upheaval. The Smarts try to make sense of their bewildering emotions as Amber tramples over family boundaries and forces them to think about their world and themselves in an entirely new way. The Accidental is at once a mysterious web of secret identities and a ruthlessly honest look at the silent cracks that can develop unnoticed in relationships over time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4716 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-06
• Released on: 2006-04-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Review
Dazzling wordplay and abundant imagination invigorate a tale of lives interrupted. Highly touted Brit Smith (Hotel World, 2002, etc.) is an original whose choppy perspectives and internal riffs take some getting used to. This third novel, her second to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, reveals its hand slowly as it switches among Alhambra, a recurrent character, and the separate trajectories of the Smart family, on holiday in Norfolk. Astrid, 12 and bored, sees life at one remove through the viewfinder of her camera; her brother Magnus, implicated in a bullying that led to a school mate's death, is borderline suicidal; their mother, Eve, a writer, is blocked; and their stepfather, Michael, an academic, is a compulsive philanderer. Each of these lives is thrown onto a different track by the arrival of mysterious, mercurial Amber, who is probably not telling the truth when she says she became a vagrant after killing a child in a car accident. Amber is lovely, fierce and unpredictable. She throws Astrid's camera away and seduces Magnus. Indifferent towards Michael's physical charms, she reveals to him the waning of his sexual allure. After Amber kisses Eve, she is thrown out of the house, and takes her revenge by stripping the Smarts' London home of everything, including faucets and doorknobs. But even bigger things are ahead. Inventive, intelligent, playful, Smith has a pin-sharp ear for her characters' voices. Underneath the glittering surface lies a darker debate about truth and consequences, as well as a magnificent history of the cinema. It's not so much about the story as it is about the virtuosity of the telling. (Kirkus Reviews)

About the Author
Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. She is the author of Free Love, Like, Other Stories and Other Stories, Hotel World and The Whole Story and Other Stories.

Customer Reviews

Meh...............
I read this book on holiday. Although entirely unconvincing, with unashamedly annoying charcters, it was such an easy read that towards the end I felt I must have missed something more profound. I fear not. On completion I was almost indifferent if not a little perturbed.

I passed it on to a female friend, in case it was a gender orientated emotional/intellectual fault on my part. She (tellingly, I believe) never reported back.

Not sure what I got from this book. Well packaged tripe. Try for yourself, but I would say don't expect much, as it doesn't appear to do anything like what it says on the tin.

plot borrowed from 1968 film!
No-one has remarked on the enormous resemblances between the plot of this book and Pasolini's 1968 film 'Teorema', in which a beautiful young man infiltrates a wealthy family, makes everyone fall in love with him, and the film ends with the father of the family stripping off at a train station and apparently leaving all his worldly goods behind.

This gives the beginning of the book, and the reference to 1968, a new meaning.

crackling, witty writing with a sense of many layers - worth re-reading
An `accidental' is an occasional musical note outside the key signature of a piece and also a migrating bird blown way off its normal route and into a strange new land. The `accidental' in this novel is Amber, a 30-something, hippy-ish stranger who arrives at the Norfolk holiday home of the Smart Family and insinuates herself into the lives of Astrid (aged 12), Magnus (aged 16), their mother Eve, and step-father Michael. Amber is an unusual visitor, an exotic, but very much an assured presence who proceeds to disrupt, challenge and infatuate each of them.

This book has acquired something of a reputation in various quarters on account of its playful and experimental style. Some of the angrily critical readers' reviews on Amazon clearly think this too clever by half but I found the book to be witty, light of touch, and with a sympathetic insight into each of her characters. Astrid - `two vowels short of an asteroid' - stole the show for me as a precocious, bored and sometimes irritating young girl on the edge of her teens. Ali Smith, in my view, manages brilliantly the complex and unusual challenge of writing in the third person whilst giving voice to each member of the family in turn, so that the prose itself mirrors and gives insight into the thought patterns of each.

Another aspect of the book that seemed to stimulate the bile of some of the Amazon reviewers concerned the middle-class, self-absorbed, Islington-based Michael and Eve. The former is a philandering Eng Lit academic who seduces a string of his female undergraduate students, pretentious at times but also struggling to maintain his faith in, and the good name of, literature. Eve is a moderately successful author engaged in an ethically dubious series of `biographies' in which she has appropriated the lives of people who have died prematurely by inventing a second half of their lives as they might have developed had they lived.

The novel touches, very gently, the events of our time whilst also joking and teasing its way through the parochial concerns of this family stuck at a distance from each other - until Amber arrives - in a holiday home that has fallen far short of their expectations. Whether or not they elicit a reader's sympathies - in that we actually aspire to be like them or could enjoy or tolerate their company - seems beside the point. We have all come from some family arrangement that has taught us implicit lessons about belonging, insecurity, loyalty and abandonment, by fleeting nuance or deliberate act, and many of us will make our own adult contributions to another. Smith's characters, for me, captured significant aspects of the texture of family life, sympathetically, critically, and in prose that bubbled off the page.

In summary, I found this book such good fun - crackling, witty writing with a sense of many layers - and worth re-reading. I'm giving it 4 rather than 5 stars only because my previous two reviews to which I gave the maximum rating were concerned with huge historical events (WW2 - `The Book Thief' and the Biafran War - `Half of a Yellow Sun') and hence seem more 'deserving' of the full 5.

I look forward to reading more of Ali Smith's work.