The Accidental by Ali Smith is a lovely read. As in Hotel World, Smith is so great at capturing the individual's perspective. In The Accidental, though, she does it in the third person. This has an interesting effect: it distances the point of view from the person whose view it is whilst somehow maintaining the intimacy of that point of view. It's ultimately chilling but very beautiful.

It's also an extremely poetic novel. I recently read Trumpet by Jackie Kay, primarily a poet. And of course her novel is very 'poetic' in one sense. But I found it frustrating to read as a novel. It felt like a poem in novel form. Now sometimes that can be put to brilliant effect - cf. Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, a novel entirely constructed of sonnets and utterly gorgeous. But where Seth isn't pretending to write anything other than poems, albeit in a novel structure, Jackie Kay seemed to be trying to write prose with a poet's head on and it didn't quite work. Ali Smith does something different again. The Accidental demonstrates her talent as a prose writer to use words as a poet may do, to rub them up against each other, to feel for dissonance and strangeness, and yet construct something that is unequivocally prose. Here's a sample:

Entry! It was a wonderful word. The fly in the fly. The boy in the grass. The grass in the boy. The boy deep in the day and the day deep in the boy.

Small Wonder, the Lewes Short Story Festival, is on in September. Naomi Alderman & Matthew Kneale are reading on September 14th. Here's the rest of the programme.