A DREAM COME TRUE

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, May 22, 2005 | by ALAN TAYLOR

Ali Smith doesn't think it's possible to describe what a book is about . . . especially her latest, which she started in her sleep

WHAT ever you do, do not ask Ali Smith what her books are about. That, she says, is none of her business. Asking a writer what her book is about is like asking a chef to define the taste of a dish. What a book is about is for readers to discover and decide. All a writer can do is write it and sit patiently back and wait for a reaction.

"Oh Christ, it's awful, " says Smith, at the very thought of the question. "It's absolutely awful to be asked what a book is about. How would you ever write it? You know, it's impossible to say that kind of thing."

We are talking in Smith's bijou, a bookinsulated terraced house in a secluded Cambridge lane which she shares with Sarah Wood, her long-term partner. It is the week before the general election, when Tony Blair will lead New Labour to a "historic" third term, the very idea of which fills Scots-born Smith with dread. For the moment, however, we desist from wringing hands, and turn to fiction: who writes it, how it is sold, and its consumers, formerly known as readers.

The ostensible excuse for our meeting is the publication of Smith's third novel, The Accidental. It is let's not beat about the bush bloody good. The tone is set with the opening sentence: "My mother began me one evening in 1968 on a table in the caf of the town's only cinema." The narrator is called Amber MacDonald, both of which names are significant. Amber is an in-between sort of woman, not red nor green, an "angel-devil" is how Smith describes her. That she is also a MacDonald serves simply to confirm her otherness, the setting for the novel being mud-flat Norfolk, the antithesis of craggy Scotland. "I am directly descended from the MacDonalds of Glencoe, " she asserts.

Amber is an intruder and an outsider. She arrives out of the blue to interrupt a family holiday. The Smarts are a professional couple with a 17-year-old son named Magnus and a 12-year-old daughter called Astrid. Each of them is unhappy in their own way. Michael Smart is a philandering lecturer in the mode of Malcolm Bradbury's History Man. Eve, his wife, is a writer, who has hit upon a successful formula, a series of "autobiotruefictinterviews". Magnus is in trouble at school, having superimposed the head of one of the girls on to a naked female body with catastrophic consequences. Astrid, meanwhile, is a victim of bullying, whose hobby is film- making. Significantly, vandalism is one of her obsessions. Like Smith, she likes "to look closely at things, especially difficult things".

The Accidental gives each of the Smarts a voice but it is Amber who interacts with all of them, as it were entering their souls and their psyches, saying the unsayable, a speaker of unutterable truths. "Couldn't it sometimes take an outsider to reveal to a family that it was a family?" writes Smith.

The novel is set virtually in the present day and the conflict in Iraq rumbles in the background. Thus one has a sense of bullying happening on an international and domestic scale. Whether it is an individual or a country, it all seems to amount to much the same thing. If dare one suggest it The Accidental could be said to be about anything, could it be bullying?

Yes, concedes Smith. "It's a book about a bullying society and also the bullying narratives of that society." But what sparked this most Sparkian of novels? Wherein lies its inspiration?

"It started and this is literal with a dream, " says Smith, scarcely able to suspend her own disbelief. "I actually dreamed the first two pages and it was a prose dream. I woke up in the middle of the night and wrote down the thing I'd dreamed. I dreamed in sentences. Never happens to me. Never happened before or after. And then I was left with two pages. I woke up in the morning and thought it was all right and I thought, 'That's extraordinary. I can't quite believe that.' Because I was going to write a different book altogether. I was going to write a kind of Death In Venice book, about a much older woman and a much younger person I didn't know whether it would be a boy or a girl. It's in there, partly, that relationship. But I thought it was going to be a single voice straight through the book and it wasn't at all." What has emerged instead is Smith's most satisfying and experimental novel, which includes poems, lyrics from pop songs, movie synopses, stream of consciousness and mini plays. As ever with Smith, the style is lucid and highly literary.

Philip Larkin, for instance, is referred to as "the Sid James of English lyric poetry". At times, The Accidental feels like a prose version of a Border ballad, at others a comedy of manners. The Smarts and how superfreighted is the surname seem constantly to be courting disaster, whether it is Michael seducing students or shop girls, or Magnus attempting to hang himself in the bathroom. They are a family living on the cusp between comedy and tragedy with Amber as ringmaster. If early reviews are anything to go by, The Accidental seems destined to at least emulate its predecessor, Hotel World, which was shortlisted in 2001 for both the Booker and the Orange prizes.