Wordplay in a time of war: Book review of Ali Smith’s The Accidental
This one appeared in HT, and I now (finally) have the pleasure of seeing my reviews in print, since HT is out in Mumbai at last.
I like HT a hell of a lot. So much so, that to support it, I actually cancelled my copy of TOI (yes, incl. the free copy of Mumbai Mirror) and subscribed to HT and DNA.
That latter, of course, turned out to be a total TOI reborn, with most of the staff being ex-TOI and much the same wretched Page 3 culture and ishtyle.
But HT is truly the country’s best English-language newspaper, bar none.
Of course, I’m obviously biased, since I write for them. But if you’ve followed my columns over the years, I’ve gone on record praising HT (in my Mid-day column) years ago.
In fact, the reason I agreed to write book reviews for HT about a year ago, while turning down a dozen other publications who offered me prime-space columns, etc, was because I respected the publication. So in fact, it was because I like them that I agreed to write for them, not the other way around.
I used to like Indian Express too, and still do to some extent. But it’s lost its teeth and is threatening to slide into a middle-class left-of-the-road Page 2 1/3 culture of its own. Too many airhead columnists analysing…air.
HT lives up to its description: It’s a newspaper, not a viewspaper.
And a handsome produced and edited one.
Anyway, to get back to the point, which was the book review…
Wordplay in a time of war
The Accidental
by Ali Smith
Hanish Hamilton
Hardcover; 306 pages
What do you make of a novel which is divided into three sections titled ‘Beginning’, ‘Middle’ and ‘End’…
Which is told from within the minds of its four major characters with an eerily effective verisimilitude yet maintains an ironic third-person point of view throughout…
Which is ostensibly about middle class English life but is coloured with the awareness of the world-after-911 and at war in Afghanistan and Iraq…
Which begins like a modern British novel with a vivid, almost Chaplinesque description of the character’s conceptual origins in the café of a cinema theatre during a screening of a Terence Stamp film but eventually falls to pieces structurally (and wilfully) to become a collection of Byronic sonnets?
Ali Smith is best known as a writer of short stories and this book, her ‘first full-length novel’ smells like a collection of linked stories, and almost reads like one.
Almost, but not quite.
Because somehow, through dazzling literary virtuosity, Smith manages to pull the whole disparate bag of bits together, and makes it work as a novel.
In fact, it’s for her literary virtuosity that you really ride this tramcar through four reality-addled minds, not really for the story. Smith is firmly entrenched in the post-modern world of British literature, where the plot story is less
relevant than how it’s narrated and structured, and middle-class British sensibility is just too boring to make up a whole novel without the eyelet-lace of literary texturing.
As for characters, oh, yes, like all short story writers, Smith loves them to bits, taking them apart and putting them together until they are nothing more than literary inventions – devastatingly conceived and created, thoroughly drenched in real detail and nuance, but literary nonetheless.
Smith knows this quite well.
As does the British literary establishment, which loves her to bits too. Her Hotel World, also a patchwork quilt of linked pieces, was nominated for the Booker, the Orange, and the Queen knows what else. She’s also edited the Virago Book of Modern Women’s Fiction, is unabashed about her ‘alternate-sexuality’ and usually dedicates her books to her longtime companion Sarah.
But she’s staunchly literary, to the point that when co-editing a recent anthology with Toby Litt, she bitched openly about the inferior quality of entries from women writers, raising a brief flurry of controversy.
As you can see from her writing, she doesn’t mince words.
Which is what makes her a very good writer.
The Accidental is superficially about a ‘square’ British middle class family on holiday whose lives are disrupted by the arrival of a strange woman who interrupts, disrupts, and shakes out their lives like a dusty bedcover.
This ‘rainmaker’ plot device is an old and trusty one and it works just as well here as most other places.
But Smith isn’t really interested in the story; she immerses us so totally in the minds and inner lives of the four main characters that we are often lost, bewilderingly, but wonderfully, in the trivia and detritus of a headfull of mundance detail.
It can be fascinating as well as frustrating; the former when we’re in the head of the most author-like character Eve (herself a writer on a ‘writing holiday’) and the latter as when we’re in the mind of the adolescent Magnus).
This super-realistic attention to detail throws up interesting results, like being held hostage in a VR rig for several hours (this is a short novel and easily readable), but at the end you come away more than a little disoriented and wondering, ‘what was that all about anyway?”
Well, partly about the war.
And about the existentialist emptiness of contemporary British middle class life in the age of terrorism and sudden violence.
The fear and uneasiness is palpable throughout, as is the moral confusion of western society.
In that sense, The Accidental is also a moral exploration, whether it’s through the mind of the husband Michael, a professor who obsesses over which of his female students he should sleep with, or the young Astrid, whose concern about whether or not to cover the vandalism of an Indian curry restaurant with her mini-DV camera in a bid to help police solve the crime seems to subconsciously reflect the guilt British ‘white’ society feels about the victimization of innocent Asian
neighbours in the wake of anti-Asian sentiment.
This is best read read as a slice of contemporary British life, a kind of collection of stream-of-consciousness pieces by a ‘typical’ British middle class four-square family, with all the trivial detritus of ordinary livesand minds, but filtered through a powerful, literary sensibility that questions, probes, and analyses everything in a post-modern literary context, in a pretenaturally self-aware fashion that ultimately lapses into pure wordplay, as in the last section of doggerel which gradually resolves into Byronic verse, which, finally, is what Smith seems to long to do through this clever, almost too clever, novel in pieces.
This entry was posted on Thursday, August 11th, 2005 at 6:50 pm. It is filed under Ashok.
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