Argh! I just cannot believe it has been this long – again! Very naughty.
Part of my excuse can be assigned to my having read lots recently. I went through a mini-crisis and realised I hadn’t truly enjoyed a book for months. I could not be bothered to finish A S Byatt’s The Children’s Book (really nothing special, smug, gratuitous, overly euphemistic), J G Ballard’s Crash (I won’t describe this as it makes me incredibly angry, but suffice to say it is bland, boring, repeititve, and pathetically infantile in its repeated attempts to shock – which of course it doesn’t because I lost interest on page two. Vaughan this, Vaughan bloody that, pubis this, pubis bloody that) and a few other titles.
Finally, having been so impressed by the rave reviews of her new novels, There but for The, I decided to read The Accidental by Ali Smith. This is an amazing book: if you want something that is everything and nothing in one, I urge you to read this. It is funny, sad, wistful, shocking, wry, affectionate, mysterious, challenging and wonderful. It is Joycean at times, which if course I rather like, and she does a wonderful line in pop culture references too (you may need to google a couple of late 2003 film references). There is almost no plot of which to speak (Amber, a mysterious, beautiful woman, interrupts the family holiday in Norfolk, and we witness the fallout) but that really doesn’t matter. I loved the gentle mockery of Dr Michael Smart, replacement dad who finally gets caught up for sleeping with his students, and of duahgter Astrid, with her impressionable, early-teenage ways. Magnus, teenage son, has partly contributed to a local tragedy, and mother Eve is a workshy, deadline-missing, writer (tautologies?) with maternal guilt. Looking for family more fucked up than your own? Definitely something for you here. Smith really is remarkable in her technique: sentences that begin as haunting and eiree finish with wry ironic observation that will have you nodding in agreement, and sympathising with how hard we make things for ourselves. The novel starts in a really distancing way – until you work out – not without persistence – who’s (fucked up) head you’re in, when. Also on technique, I liked Smith’s rejection of traditional beginnings and endings – but I’ll leave that for you. If I told you that it doesn’t end at all, I’d be telling the absolute truth...
