The Accidental, by Ali Smith

"Yes - oh dear yes - the novelist tells a story," E M Forster observed in a drooping regretful voice in 1927. He was referring in particular to the tyranny of the plot, as in the middlebrow liking for a "jolly good story". Ali Smith has lots of stories in her beguiling new novel, all of them of a kind of which Forster would have approved. The central plot in The Accidental will be familiar to anyone who has seen Pier Paolo Pasolini's film Theorem, in which a beautiful young man, played by Terence Stamp, wreaks havoc on a complacent bourgeois family. Only the simple housekeeper is free from his deadly spell.

In this book it's a young woman who turns up out of nowhere to enchant and torment Michael and Eve and their children Magnus and Astrid. Her name is Amber, the colour of the warning light between red and green - between danger perhaps, and the liberty to move. She is a brilliant creation, her every speech and action completely unpredictable. The setting is an ugly house in Norfolk, which Michael and Eve have rented for the holidays. They were expecting something more palatial.

Michael is a university lecturer in English Literature, who seduces the choicest of his female students with an icy dedication to duty. Eve is in the lucrative business of literary mendacity, producing mini-biographies of people on the "What if...?" basis - sheer speculation. Magnus, at 17, is already a mathematical whizz-kid while his bored sister fills her time with her camera, supplying her own commentary to the images she captures.

Amber affects each of them differently. She has sex with Magnus in a nearby church, makes Eve resentful and angry, and exerts a frightening control over Astrid. The infatuated Michael finds himself writing sonnets, mingling doggerel with lines that have a curious resonance.

This section of the novel is not merely an isolated tour de force, since what it conveys is the mind of an educated man on the brink of a breakdown, using the strict formality of the sonnet as a means of clinging to culture and sanity. Then everything becomes fractured, and the sonnets are reduced to fragments.

The Accidental has to be commended for the constant liveliness and inventiveness of its prose. Lines from popular songs are effortlessly woven into the narrative. The farcical and mordantly serious intermingle, with Smith alert to every sad or comic nuance. She can be as beady-eyed as Muriel Spark when she wishes, but there is a concomitant warmth of feeling towards her characters to match the beadiness.

This is a deeply moral book, with a lot to say about the strangeness of human behaviour, which must often be rendered inexplicable. Because Smith is a skilled novelist there is no overt moralising, and no easy explanations to comfort the reader. To read The Accidental is to be excited from first to last. Smith has produced a page-turner for the sophisticated and literate as well as adherents of the "jolly good story". I can only express my heartfelt admiration for her daring and her courage.

Paul Bailey's 'A Dog's Life' is published by Penguin

Buy any book reviewed on this site at Independent Books Direct - postage and packing are free in the UK

Interesting? Click here to explore further