There is something ludicrously deliberate about a character in a novel about contingency and accidents writing a series of sonnet sequences. The hyperserendipity of form and content gives the impression of a fictional world being strained to rhyme with a philosophical problem. But this is a deliberate ludic strain, and it is part of what might be seen as Smith's quarrel with the novel form. While, for Murdoch, the novel offered a suitable alternative to systematized ethical theory, Smith's parodic, patterned deliberacy reveals her suspicion of the ways in which the novel, in its attempt to comprehend or express the problem of particularity, might, accidentally, swamp the instances that it is trying to preserve.
This suspicion of "palpable design" has driven Smith to interrogate the form itself, returning, after each novel, to the short story (a form which, by its very construction, leaves more room for accidents of reading). Her questioning intriguingly returns to arguments for the ethical power of extended narratives.
For Murdoch, in 1961, the "twentieth-century novel is usually either crystalline or journalistic". Neither, she wrote, "engages" with the problems of the twentieth century -a "general loss of concepts" and "the loss of a moral and political vocabulary".
The Accidental might look partly "crystalline" (a term Murdoch defined as having the properties of "a small quasi-allegorical object"). The dreamlike narrative appears to offer a way in which we might delicately align our experiences with those of a fictional world. However, Smith seems to be very much of this world: Hotel World (2001) broached questions of homelessness, and The Whole Story and Other Stories (2003) revolved around our relationship with the environment. Here, accounts of the death of Dr David Kelly as watched by Astrid on television and the imagined shooting of a twelve-year-old Palestinian boy are among the many accidents in the book. She also takes her reader back in time: the Smart children are found glued to the UK History channel, watching The Nazis: A Warning. But as the novel progresses, it deliberately frustrates both allegory and documentary, for both modes imply a relation between reality and fiction, and it is these sorts of correspondence that Smith resists.
Many of Smith's complicated imaginings about imagining are illuminated by her handling of different modes of representation, particularly photography and film.
Discomforting photographic images run through the narrative, from the frontispiece to the photo-doctoring which results in a girl's death. Here again, Smith chimes with Murdoch, who repeatedly places her characters in darkrooms and photographic labs.
Both use the idea of the camera to explore questions of realism, and of contingency. After all, photographs are, as Susan Sontag noted, "the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment which we recognize as modern". While they offer us some illusion of control over life, they are also a way of "refusing experience". Ideas about existential refusal pervade Smith's narrative, but focus most clearly on the stoical figure of Astrid, whose filming of every moment ("if she could take photographs with her eyes it would be amazing") can be seen as her reaction to the instabilities surrounding her, and on Alhambra who, like any good projectionist, knows "how to disappear".
Writing for Smith is also a way of screening and "refusing experience". The novel, as she has described it elsewhere, is "a necessary refuge". Her response to this is to produce a work that explores the very idea of a novel as a contained form. Near the conclusion she produces not so much a twist, as a double knot: Eve Smart walks away from her husband and children and wanders by accident into someone else's family home. The recurrence of the trope of the mysterious stranger has an almost stifling effect.
