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.

Some time ago, I gamboled my way through The Alteration by Kingsley Amis. This was the first book by the elder Amis that I've read and I really enjoyed it. The prose style was confident and a perfect complement to the story, it was laugh-out-loud funny in places, while being a real roller-coaster ride of tale, even though nothing much really happens. It's an "issue" book, in that a problem is presented at the start, and then the rest of the book takes the reader through a sequence of varying and highly contrasting viewpoints on the problem. But the setting and characters are so perfectly and entertainingly chosen that it doesn't feel anything like as dry as this sounds. It's the kind of book where you are continually turning the page, just to find out what the author is going to dare to do next.

That said, I was slightly disappointed by the ending, although I can't put my finger on why exactly. Maybe subliminally I was hoping for a happy ending, but I think I was also put off by the fact that the event that brings the ending about is a massive coincidence, albeit a very clever one that ties together a number of the themes set out by the book.

So what's it about? The book centres around a 10 year old chorister, Hubert, who has the singing voice of an angel and a prodigious musical talent to go with it. The story describes how Hubert and those around him wrestle (or, in some cases, fail to wrestle) with the question of whether his talent should be preserved by means of an "alteration" - surgical alteration, that is. The whole story is set in England in the 1970's but... well, perhaps the easiest way to explain is to give a quote from the very beginning of the book that gives the reader the first clues as to the setting for the story. (This is rather long but hang on in there... you won't pick up on all of the clues (I certainly didn't) but it will be worth the wait when you get there.)

Hubert Anvil's voice rose above the sound of the choir and full orchestra, reaching the vertex of the loftiest dome in the Old World and the western doors of the longest nave in Christendom. For this was the Cathedral Basilica of St George at Coverley, the mother church of all England and of the English Empire overseas. That bright May afternoon it was as full as it had ever been in the three centuries since its consecration, and it would scarcely have held a more distinguished assembly at any time: the young King William V himself; the kings of Portugal, of Naples, of Sweden, of Lithuania and a dozen other realms; the Crown Prince of Muscovy and the Dauphin; the brother of the Emperor of Almaigne; the viceroys of India, New Spain and Brazil; the High Christian Delegate of the Sultan-Calif of Turkey; the Vicar-General of the Emperor Patriarch of Candia; the incumbent Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of United England; no fewer than twelve cardinals, together with less pre-eminent clergy from all over the Catholic world--these and thousands besides had congregated for the laying to rest of His Most Devout Majesty, King Stephen III of England and her empire.

[...] A large number of those attending his Requiem Mass would have been moved as much by a sense of personal loss as by simple duty or the desire to assist at a great occasion. Just as many, perhaps, were put in awe by the size and richness of the setting. Apart from Wren's magnificent dome, the most reknowned of the sights to be seen was the vast Turner ceiling in commemoration of the Holy Victory, the fruit of four and a half years' virtually uninterrupted work; there was nothing like it anywhere. The western window by Gainsborough, beginning to blaze now as the sun first caught it, showed the birth of St Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, at Colchester. [...]Holman Hunt's oil-painting of the martyrdom of St George was less celebrated for its merits than for the tale of the artist's journey to Palestine in the hope of securing authenticity for his setting; and one of the latest additions, the Ecce Homo mosaic by David Hockney, had attracted downright adverse criticism for its excessively traditionalist, almost archaizing style. But only admiration had ever attended--to take a diverse selection--the William Morris spandrels on the transept arches, the unique chryselephantine pyx, the gift of an archbishop of Zululand, above the high altar, and Epstone's massive marble Pieta.

To few but the tone-deaf, the music must have been far more immediate than any or all of these objects: Mozart's Second Requiem (K.878), the crown of his middle age and perhaps of all his choral work. Singers and musicians had just entered upon the Agnus Dei. There was a story about this too, that it had been written out of the composer's grief at the untimely death of an esteemed and much beloved contemporary [...].

These first paragraphs set the tone for the rest of the book. The setting is England in the latter half of the 20th century, but not our 20th century. England (never referred to as Britain, though the exact history is not made clear) is a devoutly Catholic country, at the heart of a devoutly Catholic Europe. In this world, electricity and science are adjured as being evil, and an entire alternative technology based on gas power has arisen, allowing trains to travel from London to Rome in just 7 hours (over the magnificent new Channel Bridge). Martin Luther was persuaded back into the fold and became a high ranking catholic. The great enemy is the Turkish Empire and wars are still being fought over possession of Constantinople. To top it all, the Pope is a tone-deaf Yorkshire man.

The alternative reality is close enough to our own, with so many names that are recognisable, that a big part of the fun of the book is to see what strange changes the different path of history has made to these familiar figures. But it's also beautifully written and thought-provoking. I enjoyed it very much.