A magical, powerful stranger, a bewildered intelligent child, an idyllic country retreat, an adulterous husband whose job offers possibilities for investigating the novel's workings:
all these elements seem to place The Accidental firmly as neo-Murdochian pastiche. Indeed, Murdoch's 1971 tragicomedy of errors, An Accidental Man, contains a similar fatality where "a little girl of about six in a pink dress running into the roadway after a ball" is caught under the wheels of a car.
Smith is clearly interested in the sorts of dilemmas that haunt Murdoch.
However, her novel's title, hovering between adjectival ellipsis, the noun it reaches for and a nominalized adjective, valuing the particular inflection above the abstraction, suggests that she is also drawn to examine the ways in which such problems are framed. Smith, like Alhambra, likes to think about moving shapes: "the kinematograph. The eidoloscope. The galloping tintypes. The silver screen. The flicks. The pictures . . . . Misty watercolour memories . .
. . I was born free, I've had the time of my life and for all we know I'm going to live forever". As Alhambra's spools of glittering autobiography reel into gnomic disco folklore, Smith's sense for the gifts implicit in words, rhythms, cliches, or what Auden calls "the accidental beauties of silly songs" is evident. Such verbal artistry bears witness to a true sensitivity to the particular. As a writer who moves between the short story and the novel she is alert both to the "contingent details of choice" and the virtues and perils of trying as a novelist to hold things together. The Accidental, as a result, repeatedly challenges its own formal boundaries: Smith gives us a Sterne-like opening which presses on the idea of conception, a pastiche of Joyce's "Ithaca" in catechetical question-and-answer form, and, most surprisingly, a central section of the novel which breaks into poetry:
Everything round them was silent, quite still, deceptively ordinary, deep-down-prosaic -exactly the same as every other night. But something strange had happened to everything, something that came as formed, velvet, disdainful as a cat. Change had happened. Everything rhymed now.
Yes, ab was following ab, and then the way cd followed cd, ef, gg . . . Because he taught this sort of thing allday he tuned straight to it, like a radio frequency:
Michael's world had become a sonnet sequence(y) This queasy fusion of Vikram Seth and Gerard Manley Hopkins is inspired by Michael's feelings for Amber, and his lust offers Smith the chance to explore the philosophical possibilities of appalling rhymes. Through playing with Michael's verse ("apparently the TLS or someone wanted to publish two of them"), she finds a way of examining the temptations of composure; the way it can be seen as a release from the terror of life's shapelessness. The difficulty of sustaining form is revealed as Michael's slightly haphazard sonnet sequence starts to break down, scattered across the novel's pages -"Heart rags frag ments metalled no one spoke / back.
/ Deep-down a / new tongue ec lips ed through the world. / He realised he was not adequate" before rearranging itself as a mock Byronic ottava rima.
