His wife, Eve, a successful genre writer in a kind of `invented biography’ field, taking the lives of real people who died early and inventing longer lives for them. Everything they are, everything that happens, came from their natures and their choices, not from `accident’īut enough of this elusive waffle, what is the outline of this bookĪ family of 4, Michael, University lecturer in the English Department, serial philanderer. The mysterious agent-provocateur, Amber/Alhambra, whose conception, in the café of an Alhambra cinema is detailed at the start, will enter the lives of a fairly ordinary family, in the guise of a saviour to some, and as some kind of devastating Kali figure to others, whose trail of destruction forces changes and awakening on them. The title of Smith’s book is of course mocking and, `Yeah, Right!’ because the whole tenor of the book decries `the accident’.
Not playing it safe tumbles to be expected when such a high wire act is happeningĪli Smith’s The Accidental is bold, playful, exuberant, and with its opening chapter about the very accident of conception itself – one egg, the possibility offered by a myriad spermatozoa, bursting vibrantly and provocatively into introducing the protagonist from – where, heaven?, hell? the here and now? – it reminded me not a little of Kate Atkinson’s first novel, Behind The Scenes At The Museum.
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