Narrative
Fine fusion of forms
RENUKA RAJARATNAM
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The Accidental boldly steps outside its own formal boundaries and blends different modes of expressions.
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Ali smith broaches the question of the novel's ethical status and re-creates a hybridised narrative design in an attempt to invent a different sort of newness
The Accidental, Ali Smith, Gardners Books, 2005, £22.95.
AN extraordinary picture composed of broken shards of glass and mixed media in oil adorns the front cover of Ali Smith's third novel, The Accidental. The artwork, which is curiously titled "Fine Balance", by Derek Jarman leaves an impression of what one of Smith's characters in the novel calls "the alternative aftermath". This tunes the reader's experience of estrangement and uncertainty of what "appears to be" in the novel. Like many of Smith's novels, The Accidental interrogates the notions of conception, contingency, instability and explores the fallibility of the novel form, which, in Smith's opinion, is disengaged from the concerns of contemporary life.
Ali smith broaches the question of the novel's ethical status and re-creates an avant-garde, hybridised narrative design in an attempt to invent a different sort of newness and to reconstruct what Irish Murdoch called "the loss of moral and political vocabulary". In the process, the novel boldly steps outside its own formal boundaries and blends promiscuously with different modes of expressions such as cinema, photography, poetry and achieves a fine acrobatic balance of mixed forms, images and genres.
Fiction and experience
The first of the epigraphs of the novel, taken from John Berger's The Shape of a Pocket, provides an entry point for an understanding of what Smith explores in the novel, which is the space between experience and fiction: "Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narrative being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous". While this initiates the emotional tone of the novel, Smith opens her story rather dramatically with idea of beginning vibrantly narrated by Alhambra, a refreshingly quirky character who views the world around her in moving shapes and images. Alhambra was conceived on a table in a cinema café and charmingly engages the reader in the grand design of her birth: "I was born in the year of the supersonic, the era of the multistory multivitamin multitonic... I opened my eyes. It was all in colour. The students were on the barricades... the Beatles were transcendental, they opened a shop. It was Britain. It was great."
Drawing from Pier Pasolini's film "Theorem" in which Terence Stamp entrances a bourgeois family, Smith invents the character of Amber who turns out to be a fatal attraction to the Smart family. The story of the Smart family forms the larger part of the novel but is inscaped as an inner-plot presented through the second frame of the narrative. Eve Smart is a popular micro-history writer who is interested in stories of how "things could have been". Eve rents a summerhouse in the village of Norfolk, imagining that it would be an ideal summer retreat set amidst an idyllic surrounding. But the advert tricks her and the summerhouse is really a shoddy "substandard" shed. While she copes with this situation, she is joined by her husband Michael and the children Magnus and Astrid.
Complications
Michael Smart is an English lecturer in London University and is involved in an illicit affair with his student. Magnus is a withdrawn adolescent who is indirectly responsible for the death of his schoolmate, who killed herself because he had shown his friends how to attach her face on a pornographic image and send it around the e-mail list. The youngest member of all is the fourteen-year-old Astrid. In reaction to her disconnected and unstable familial condition, Astrid is seen resorting to filming. Astrid is fascinated with the breaking of the dawns and films them every day on her digital camera. Smith, like Astrid, is preoccupied with the notion of beginning and returns to question it quite frequently in the novel.
Amber, the mysterious, nomadic stranger, accidentally enters the dysfunctional home of the Smarts. She connects with the Smart family in many surprising ways. Amber sleeps with Magnus in the village church, throws Astrid's digital camera over the bridge, reads Eve's and Michael's minds and has Michael craving for her.
This section of the novel bursts into sonnets describing Michael's lust and philosophy of desire for Amber. As the verses fade out and collapse, scattered across the middle-section of the novel, we see Smith restlessly moving in and out of the confines of forms and seeking refuge in other ways of writing. Screening seems to be one way of writing too. Smith translates complicated images of "accidental realities" into film and photography as representative modes, which may provide an illusion of control over life. The sections where Astrid watches the coverage of Dr. David Kelly's death on television and the viewing of the History Channel's The Nazis, imply a blurred relation between documented reality and fiction. Smith diligently explores the existential dilemmas that haunted writers ranging from Sophocles to Irish Murdoch and James Joyce and offers a contemporary perspective of the "old shapes of things".
Surprise ending
In the end, the novel progresses towards a surprising double twist, which, ironically, suggests a beginning rather than an end. One is the sudden return of the cinematic magical-mystery Alhambra, suggesting that the Smarts' story is a mere projection of her inventive film-spool; the other is the decisive walk-out of Eve Smart from her home, rejecting her familial discomfort and how she walks into (accidentally, of course) an unknown home. Another dawn. Another beginning. The strange and the stranger, both become a trope for change and a new beginning.
Recently in the news for being short-listed for the Man-Booker prize this September, The Accidental truly deserves its new status. The novel is remarkable for its incredible inventiveness and for its responsibility in seeking out and questioning the moral power of the novel form. In reshaping and refining old questions, values and forms, Smith achieves a fresh renewal of language and perhaps a renewal of herself as a writer too.
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