The Accidental

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It follows a middle-class English family who are visited by an uninvited guest, Amber, while they are on holiday in a small village in Norfolk. His reasons for not acting on them are less admirable: He likes Sarah and she’s the total package; why would he give that up just because every time he and Laurie have enough time together (and just enough alcohol) they nearly fall into each other’s arms?

She has also been subjected to bullying at school and her mobile phone has been stolen by older girls. But Amber isn't entirely harmless: she's not only completely independent, she has a destructive bent, and doesn't much care what she leaves in her wake. So sure-handed are Smith's overlapping descriptions of the same events from different viewpoints that her simple, disquieting story lifts into brilliance. Amber doesn’t really have any convincing alternative reality to offer, though Smith tries to convince us, unsuccessfully for me, that her belligerent ministrations are empowering, redemptive, life changing.

Each has different preoccupations -- and often is hiding something from the others (though Amber causes much of that to spill out, one way or another). In a positive review by The Guardian, Steven Poole notes that " The Accidental has an infectious sense of fun and invention. 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 from 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).

Although the novel dazzles with the richness of language and ideas, it retains a delicious lightness. Ali Smith makes a strength of her insecurity as a novelist -- which is, in fact, an insecurity about the power of the novel. The story is of a dysfunctional London family in summer residence in a rural town in Norfolk, with sections alternately told from the minds of an adult couple, Michael and Eve, and their kids, twelve-year old Astrid and seventeen-year old Magnus. Magnus thinks she is an angel come to save him from suicide and deliver him into a new life of sexual bliss. 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.The Accidental has some marvelous characterizations -- Astrid is the book's crowning glory -- and the writing brims with wit, humor, and energy. There are, of course, literary progenitors—you can hear the satirical scrape of Muriel Spark (whom Smith admires), and detect the influence of Virginia Woolf (fluid interior monologue, an interest in artists, and in genderless creativity). Ali Smithis the author of many works of fiction, including,most recently, Winter, Autumn, Public Library and other Stories,and How to be Both,which wonthe Baileys Prize for Women's Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize, and the Costa Novel of the Year Award.

Because Smith is a skilled novelist there is no overt moralising, and no easy explanations to comfort the reader. She was a lecturer at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow until she retired after contracting chronic fatigue syndrome, to concentrate on writing books.

So is, soon enough, Magnus (helped by the fact that she's willing to sexually initiate him -- and then practise with him, over and over).