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Ali Smith is a writer’s writer, but increasingly, as her sales and the size of her postbag indicate, a reader’s one too.Ever since the publication of her first book, Free Love, in 1992, it has been clear that her continuing obsession is with how stories work. The Accidental comes as something of a surprise. It has three sections, of about 100 pages each, entitled "The beginning", "The middle" and "The end". As this indicates, it offers a bigger than usual dose of conventional narrative satisfactions: a compelling story, for example, and strong characters. Was this a deliberate move? "It wasn’t conscious," Smith tells me firmly. "I suppose it’s because it’s a book about narrative structure, about how stories work." It is surely also, I say, a novel about film. The Accidental begins and ends in a cinema and has a leitmotif of cinematic allusions and symbols. "Yes, it is a cinema book," Smith agrees, "which is perhaps why it’s more mainstream. I think it must be about mainstream narrative.
The house is, in fact, a holiday cottage in Norfolk. It has been rented for the summer by a London media couple in search of rural peace and charm. He is Michael Smart, an academic who regards the seduction of his students as a standard perk of the job. She is his wife, Eve, a writer who has made a name, and fortune, from appropriating the hidden histories of ordinary men and women. Her daughter, Astrid, prefers to see life through the lens of her digital camera, while her maths-whizz son, Magnus, broods in his bedroom, silent and unwashed. A knock on the door from a beautiful stranger changes everything—at first for the better and later, dramatically, for the worse. Gradually, excruciatingly, we watch the family’s lives unravel. It is beautifully done. It is also, as Smith points out, "an old, old story, the story of the person who knocks on the door asking for help, or asking for water." Needless to say, this being Ali Smith, it is much more than a story. "When something comes from the supposed outside to the supposed inside," she explains, "you have the basis for primal narrative. What’s happening right now is about who’s inside and where the authority lies and what the structure is."
"I don’t think it does writers any good to be ‘political’, but we can’t help but be political, because we are human beings and we live in history... Where there’s dialogue, things can progress. We’re living in a time," she adds, "which is about monologue. I know that people will see this as a surface book, but I see it as a war book, because it’s about that year where things were so surface." Smith believes that "public exposure does writers no good". A writer who says that "books and money don’t mix". And that fashions in fiction are "fickle and brief". Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962. She worked for some years as an academic before becoming a full-time writer. Her first collection of short stories, Free Love, won the Satire Society Scottish First Book of the Year Award as well as a Scottish Arts Council Award. Her first novel, Like, was published in 1997. It was followed by a second set of short stories, Other Stories and Other Stories and a novel, Hotel World (2001), which won the Encore Award, a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and the inaugural Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award. It was also shortlisted for both the Orange and the Booker prizes. Her other books are The Whole Story and Other Stories and The Accidental. Smith lives in Cambridge with her partner, Sarah, a film-maker. By arrangement with The Independent |
It’s
about what stories we are being told and what stories we tell
ourselves." It started with a dream: "This is going to sound
fey, but I woke up at 5am with a prose voice and wrote it down. Usually,
if you do that, it will be shit. But the next day I looked at it and
thought, it’s alright. Then," she adds, "there was an image,
which is of a house which is looked at from the outside—which is the
perfect way to explore structure as well."