The Accidental by Ali Smith
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Let's begin with a short passage from the novel:
"God, those Bergman films were such hard work. They were beautiful. But impenetrable [...]"

If we ignore the bit about being beautiful, that's exactly how I feel about The Accidental. I am not patient enough (meaning I am too lazy) to work hard to translate the stream of consciousness of the novel's protagonists into my traditional, constrained way of interacting with literature. The low rating reflects my feeling of the text's impenetrability. Obviously, literary critics know better: the book was the winner of the Whitbread Award for Best Novel, and it was a Man Booker Prize finalist.

The novel is structured as a sequence of internal monologues of the four main characters (the family consisting of mother Eve, her husband Michael, son Magnus, and daughter Astrid), augmented by several rather cryptic interludes from an external narrator. I do appreciate the fact that each of the characters has their own inner monologue voice and that these voices differentiate the characters' perceptions of the events. I do appreciate the author's consistent focus on cinema and film art as well as on language itself (and on how the characters interact with language). While I much appreciate the puns and wordplay, the "poetry" sections or using mathematical terms in describing an intimate encounter do not quite work, in my view. The enigmatic conclusion seems to emphasize the cyclicity of human events.

In my simple-mindedness I question the need for the nontraditional narration while a conventional one would suffice. The events of that summer of 2003, when a mysterious stranger suddenly appeared in the life of a family vacationing in Norfolk, and how that stranger influenced each of the four family members and the family as a whole, are interesting enough to be portrayed by a traditional, omniscient narrator. The novel actually comes close to that in the penultimate monologue, which I felt as a relief.




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