The novel's coda, returning to the flickering cinematic Alhambra, suggests that the Smarts may have been a projection of her never-ending film-spool. The Accidental is a theatrical novel -one full of spectacular tricks. It is most surprising because it offers such discomfort about its projected completion and incompletion; it is in this way a far darker work than The Whole Story and Other Stories.

Smith's is, like Chaplin's, "an austere art", and such austerity is, perhaps, best summoned by the picture of the sheep that stands at the beginning of the novel.

The reasons for including this image are unclear -deliberately so. It is perhaps coincidental that a recent experiment at Cambridge University proved that, while we see sheep as rather alike, they are fiercely attentive to the different particularities of each other's faces. But it is surely no accident that Smith chose to begin her own "necessary refuge" with an image of a creature trapped in an apparently secure environment.

Ali Smith makes a strength of her insecurity as a novelist -which is, in fact, an insecurity about the power of the novel. Original, restless, formally and morally challenging, she remains a writer who resists definition.