False Azure

Ali Smith's the accidental is one of those books that makes me feel like two separate people inhabiting the same brain. The writer-me found it intriguing and unusual, a wonderful lesson in tight third person viewpoint as well as in using multiple viewpoints on the same set of events to deepen and broaden a story, rather than as a mere authorial convenience. As a reader, though, it left me largely unmoved. Strangely, I'm not sure these two sets of views on the book are entirely contradictory.

The book centres around five main characters: Eve, a writer and mother; Michael, her ambitious academic husband; Astrid and Magnus, Eve's children by her first husband; and Amber, the catalytic stranger who drops into the middle of this troubled family while they are spending the summer in a rural holiday home. Each chapter is written from the viewpoint of a separate chapter, rotating through them in the same order as the book progresses. The family members are written in third-limited and roughly the same length; Amber's chapters are first person, and typically much shorter and far more ambiguous, functioning more like commentaries on the theme of the story than anything else.

With the third person chapters, Smith uses the narrative voice to bring us right into the heads of the characters... it's not quite stream-of-consciousness, but it's perhaps as near as can be got it without being irritating as hell. And each chapter has a very distinct voice. The characters all emerge as quite different but believable people within just a few swift sentences of the start of each chapter. I particularly liked Astrid's continual use of the phrase "typical and ironic", and even found myself saying it when something typical and ironic happened not long after I'd finished the book.

This is also a book where the structure, the underlying skeleton of the story, was made very visible and explicit, and it was interesting to watch the reaction of the reader-me to this. I found I was willing to go along with it, but really expected to get some big pay-off from it at the end. Since I didn't really get one (or missed it, if it was there), the explicit structure started to feel like authorial intrusion - it was rather strange to get that sense from chapter headings and choice of viewpoint, and so on, rather than from the story itself...

As a reader, my main problem with the book was that Amber is supposed to be very attractive and charismatic, but I just found her incredibly smug and irritating. She makes bold pronouncements, apparently based on a supernatural knowledge of the family members' history and thoughts, she interferes into the lives of the family members in quite grandiose ways, with a confidence that can only be explained by the fact that the author is continually bending down and whispering in her ear, "go on, it's alright, this is the right thing to do". The ending of the book tries to suggest that this confidence is born out of the emotional distance of being swept into the lives of strangers without the baggage of your history and past mistakes. But I don't buy that myself. Nor did I get much out of Amber's interlude chapters. They were fun to read, but they took me out of the story world, rather than adding a new dimension to it. I suppose they did serve the useful function of stopping me from trying to make Amber work as a real person in the story - but they didn't help me to think of her as anything more significant than a literary device.

It's entirely possible that I've completely missed the point that the book was trying to convey. (It is a book that works hard at having a point.) I certainly admired the writing, and it's a wonderful tutorial on deep third-person limited viewpoint. But, for me, the accidental remains very firmly in the territory of good book, but never makes it into the land of good story.