THE ACCIDENTAL. By Ali Smith. 306pp. Hamish Hamilton. Pounds 14.99. 0 241 14190 7
Ali Smith plays games with films, photographs and verse
In a recent newspaper article, Ali Smith and Toby Litt defended the selection of writers they had chosen for inclusion in their New Writing 13 anthology.
They were looking, they explained, for a different sort of newness. Not so much "originality", for that "is only proven over time, paradoxically", but "writing that renews language itself, or battles with the old shapes of things". Such battling is clearly found in The Accidental. Smith's third novel -each of her previous novels has been preceded and followed by a short-story collection -seems to be reworking old shapes and old questions in every way. This allusive, ambitious and formally acrobatic work sets out to explore questions of contingency, the value of particularity and the moral status of narrative.
In this, Smith's clearest debt seems to be to the models laid down by the existential writing of the late 1960s, and, in particular, to the writings of Iris Murdoch.
Smith's interest in writing's ethical imperative is clear from the first of her novel's epigraphs, taken from The Shape of a Pocket by John Berger (2000):
"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". But while this offers a starting point for an analysis of The Accidental, it is a novel that, like many of Smith's works, questions the very notion of a beginning. The Berger epigraph jostles against snatches from Jane Austen, Sophocles and Charlie Chaplin, and on the preceding page there is a photograph of a large sheep gazing through a chain link fence.
Its expression is both challenged and challenging -balefully longing and faintly irritated.
Such emotional challenges are in tune with the reader's experience of the novel.
We begin with a frame narrator, the mysterious Alhambra, who was conceived on a table in a cinema cafe in 1968, the product of "literally millions of possibilities".
