Fiction: Just when it seems that the narrator of Ali Smith's characteristically playful new novel is poised to tell the story of her life as it developed after a speedy post-cinema café-floor encounter, she follows her dad's example and disappears. Or does she?
Smith doesn't much care for the obvious. The Accidental makes up its rules as it goes along. This should prove far more irritating than it is. Smith's jaunty, relaxed approach eases her yarn from the casual and ironic to the potentially profound.
The search for what exactly happened to the narrator is more or less forgotten as centre stage is quickly usurped by young Astrid Smart, a 12-year-old girl in possession of an expensive cine camera and not much else to do but film the lack of events that passes for daily life in the turgid Norwich village her family has retreated to for the summer. Astrid is interestingly eccentric, but her teenage brother is in shock, having been unwittingly associated with a classmate who has killed herself.
Their father is Michael Smart, a college professor with problems of his own, the legacy of years of sexual involvements with his female students. Mother, a writer, is also burdened. She writes the life stories of people who have died prematurely, without actually having had a life. By creating histories that never had a chance to happen, she is compensating for her own fragmented existence.
The domestic story neatly and cleverly examines the respective family members. Into all this upheaval enters Amber, a thirtysomething woman still acting the girl who lives in her car and scrounges from whoever she meets in the course of her journeying. All of this may sound clever, too clever, and it is, except that Smith manages to stay the entertaining side of clever, avoiding the pretension so habitual in contemporary British fiction. It is worth recalling that Smith was recently castigated, with fellow editor Toby Litt , for dismissing " dauntingly undaring" submissions to their New Writing 13 anthology, published by Picador.
The Accidental is random and, if initially Smith demonstrates that she is yet another clever, confident Scottish writer with more than nationality in common with AL Kennedy, she also defers to the subversion that renders Alasdair Gray such an original. She is not so much challenging narrative as actively playing with it. The main story takes shape with all the ease of an improvised jazz session, providing Smith with the opportunity to offer her generalised views on today's culture and on how movies and television emerge as our points of reference.
For much of the book, Smith is in free fall, gleefully telling the story of the doomed holiday home that seems an odd place for the family to have chosen until their circumstances are explained. Amber is a fallen angel, given in equal measures to the benign and the malevolent. She somewhat improbably manages to take over the Smart family through a mixture of charm, whimsy, seduction and menace. The narrative technique appears to borrow its style from that of the hand-held cine camera; this may be deliberate or, like much else about this performance, accidental.
The Smart family deals with its various ghosts. All the while, Eve, the mother, is becoming the one character with whom it is possible to engage. It is not surprising that she should invent histories for characters whose lives were stolen, as much of her own has been a search for the one she was denied. Her life with her husband seems to have been sustained by compromise. When they return from their drab vacation, their house has been emptied to the floorboards.
Smith is good with dialogue and, even at its oddest, the offbeat narrative meanders on, carrying with it the daily detritus of ordinary lives. Although she does tend to control her characters, they still interact convincingly.
There is also the mad wealth of topical lists and observations. It is a narrative very much of its time, our time, and the language of popular culture determines the prose.
It is also, at times, very funny. Smith has a flair for the daft aside; even the characters share private jokes. The one-liners accumulate. Despite the suspicion that it is all a bit too casually handled, such is Smith's obvious confidence (thanks to her previous novels, such as Hotel World) that it is a fun read well able to balance its darker side. Just as the family is preparing to leave their disastrous holiday home, which never lived up to its agency description, Michael Smart, soon-to-be-disgraced college professor, gives the cleaning lady and her Hoover a lift. He can't help noticing that she "was quite ugly-looking, ruddy. Most of the villagers looked like that, like all their lives they'd eaten nothing but raw beets they'd dug up out of the fields". It's that kind of book; better on barbed random observation than explanation. Smith has not written a masterpiece, but this hip trip through a valley of distorted mirrors and troubled minds succeeds in looking at life with a saving sense of reflexive comedy.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
The Accidental. By Ali Smith Hamish Hamilton, 306pp. £14.99