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: #8187 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-06
• Released on: 2006-04-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

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

Genius or just trying too hard?
As the title of this review suggests, my feelings about this novel are complex and I don't think I can adequately answer the question I have posed myself. There are moments of pure genius within this text - pieces of narrative that literally sweep you up with their ingenuity. Smith certainly excels when utilising her own unique stream of consciousness style and this alone makes the book worth reading. I also found the structure satisfying, with the sense of full circle achieved at the end. What lets this text down is the occasional sense that it is just trying to be that little bit too clever, a little bit too self aware of its status as a story telling medium. Three stars may be a little harsh - three and a half more accurate. I would certainly recommend this to anyone who enjoys an author unafraid to play with the novel genre but prepare to feel a little disappointed. This feels like the work of an author on the way to greatness but not quite there yet.

An Illuminating Book
The difficulty with this book is that is hard to get into. There is no comforting authorial voice to guide you and no clear linear narrative structure. Instead we hear the 4 voices of the Smart family in turn describing their particular relationship with Amber and her tumulutous and life-affirming effect on them.

The connection to Pasolini's 1968 film 'Theorem' is important and is provided by Terence Stamp (see the first chapter). His character in 'Theorem' comes into a bourgeios family and destroys them. Here the effect in the opposite. Each member of the dysfunctional Smart family lives in isolation, Magnus is on the verge of suicide unknown to his mother, step-father and sister, who are each self-absorbed, alienated from each other and miserable, even if they are not aware of it. Both parents are living unsatisfactory, mistaken lives with no real sense of what is going on within and around them.

Amber's effect is like light, clarity, insight and understanding. Each character is freed from their damaging and damaged past and finds new ways of living.

Brilliant and misunderstood
I don't write that many Amazon reviews but given some of the negative ones for this book, I had to. Personally, I thought the book was absolutely brilliant and, as others have said, the change in narrative tone depends on who's doing the narrating. As for Michael, he was a fantastic comic figure, especially in his middle section, the one written in verse. I take my hat off to Ali Smith for being able to move between prose and poerty in that way, but for anyone who doesn't like poetry, you can read it just as prose. It works that way, too.

The reason for four rather than five stars is the slightly disappointing ending. Although we don't really need to know who Amber really is, the three passages about her do suggest there are clues to her identity and it would have been nice to know what that identity was. And while I had no problem with Eve in the States, the suggestion that she might be going to retsart the whole cycle was a little silly: the point about Amber was that she was totally unique.

This is clearly one of those novels, though, that people either love or hate and to be honest I can't imagine haiting it. It's frequently called pretentious, too, which I didn't think it was at all (and I loathe McEwan et al for their pretension.) I hope to read a good deal more of her work.