The Accidental

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Astrid's mother, Eve, is supposed to be writing the next in her series of "Genuine Articles", books that relate the lives of people who died in the second world war, but then carry on as though they had lived - which enables Smith to make some nice jokes at the expense of the biography industry. Eve's husband, Michael, is a philandering university teacher of literature; her son Magnus, the least convincingly drawn person, thinks in mathematical terms and has done something terrible at school. But hiding away becomes less and less easy: her new friends urgently need her help and there’s a mystery that needs solving, all before they reach New York . . . While building on “green” land seems sacrilege, he says we have an exaggerated notion of how built up Britain really is. According to the UK National Ecosystem Assessment, 7% of Britain is built on, rising to 10.6% in England alone. In 2012, the BBC reporter Mark Easton analysed this statistic and found that when you take into account urban gardens, parks and other green areas, the proportion of England that is built up drops to 2.3% (and lower nationally). Reese, Jennifer (6 January 2006). "The Accidental (2006)". Entertainment Weekly . Retrieved 19 April 2008. In a country in which farms take up almost 57% of the land, the tiny, unmeasured fraction of accidental countryside we have needs protecting, says Moss, who made programmes with Bill Oddie for many years and has been a birder since boyhood. “Our society is geared to paying farmers very little money to produce huge amounts of food so supermarkets can make big profits and we have cheap food. Everyone’s happy except the farmers and the wildlife,” he says.

a b Schaub, Michael (8 January 2006). "Surprise visit upends a family's vacation". San Francisco Chronicle . Retrieved 18 April 2008. Ali Smith is a Scottish author, born in Inverness in 1962. [5] She was a lecturer at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow until she retired after contracting chronic fatigue syndrome, to concentrate on writing books. [6] Smith's first book, Free Love and Other Stories, was published in 1995 and praised by critics; it was awarded the Saltire First Book of the Year award. [5] Plot [ edit ] Even better is the way that Astrid changes. Many child narrators are artificially fixed in an idealistic moment to teach us something about youth and innocence. Though the action of The Accidental spans only a few months, Smith manages to render a sense of learning and linguistic faddishness in the girl. When the novel begins, Astrid's favourite word is "substandard", but by the end it is in the process of being replaced by "preternaturally". She uses "ie" a lot at first, and then switches to "id est" once someone tells her that it comes from Latin. a b Caldwel, Gail (22 January 2006). "Perfect stranger". The Boston Globe . Retrieved 30 March 2008. Some smaller nature havens don’t even have names. One particular pond known to wildlife fans on the edge of the Chilterns to the west of London, home to the rare southern damselfly, had been drained when Moss returned to it as his book was going to press. And the rich surrounding vegetation, beloved of butterflies, had been cleared. “That’s the fate of so much of the accidental countryside,” Moss writes.Murray, Noel (21 February 2006). "The Accidental". The A.V. Club. Archived from the original on 16 May 2008 . Retrieved 19 April 2008. Ratcliffe, Sophie (20 May 2005). "Life in sonnet form". The Times Literary Supplement . Retrieved 18 April 2008. Set in 2003, the novel consists of three parts: "The Beginning," "Middle" and "The End". Each part contains four separate narrations, one focusing on each member of the Smart family: Eve, the mother, Michael, her husband, Astrid (12) and Magnus (17), two children of Eve's from a previous marriage (to Adam Berenski). Opening and closing the novel, and between each part, we have four sections of first-person narration from 'Alhambra' – who we can assume is Amber, the Smarts' uninvited house-guest. Cities invite biodiversity, says Moss, partly because they provide warmth – the reason he suspects he spotted his first bumblebee of the year here today, rather than near his home in Somerset. “There’s a longer growing season so there’s more natural and semi-natural food, places to nest and food that we provide.” verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{

The critic John Sutherland also comments on the novel's "remarkable narrative obliquity". [9] He notes also the intertextual and "intergeneric" nature of the book, the way in which it references the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1968 film Teorema in which, likewise, "a mysterious, beautiful stranger [...] arrives from nowhere into a family and, simply by virtue of what he is, destroys their merely 'theoretic' coherence". [9] Sutherland also stresses the ways in which Amber is "the offspring of cinema". [9] Reception [ edit ] The reservoir was built in 1833, but was developed as wetlands with thriving reed beds and opened to the public in 2016. This is the result of investing in what the natural history writer and television producer Stephen Moss calls our accidental countryside. “My definition of it is quite simple,” he says. “Excluding farmland and gardens, it’s any place that was created originally for human use that wildlife either stayed in, or found and moved into later.” Into this atomised family one day walks Amber, a thirtysomething blonde wastrel with no love of social niceties. She turns up on the doorstep claiming her car has broken down. Michael assumes she has come to interview Eve, while Eve assumes she is one of Michael's student mistresses; somehow Amber ends up staying with them in the rented cottage for several weeks. Everyone falls in love with Amber in a different way. But who is she, and what does she want?He quotes the environmentalist Chris Baines who said that one way to improve the biodiversity of an arable field is to build a housing estate on it. “This may sound glib, but he was being entirely serious,” writes Moss in his new book, The Accidental Countryside. “Most arable fields are monocultural deserts, with virtually no wildlife, whereas Britain’s gardens are often home to a suite of former woodland birds and other wild creatures.” a b c "Ali Smith". Contemporary Writers.com. Archived from the original on 16 July 2009 . Retrieved 4 May 2008.

Strolling around the reservoir at Woodberry wetlands, we pass walkers and runners wearing blissful expressions. “One of the most exciting things the accidental countryside offers,” says Moss, “is making nature available to everyone.” A mother watches the water birds (there are five species of gull) while her toddler plays with stones on the pathway. And a lone walker bids us good morning – something strangers rarely do in London. When Patch runs up the gangway of steamship, RMS Glorious, she isn’t planning to hang around. But if she leaves her hiding place the constable might catch her: sitting tight is worth the risk. Too late, she realises the ship is setting sail! Patch has become an accidental stowaway. a b Smith, Ali (2005). The Accidental. ISBN 978-0-241-14190-8 . Retrieved 19 April 2008. The Accidental. Turrentine, Jeff (26 February 2006). "When a Stranger Calls". The Washington Post . Retrieved 19 April 2008. The third first-person narration from Alhambra follows, which is much the same as the second. We then have "The End", which takes us to the Smart home once they return from holiday. The house has been emptied of all possessions – we must assume, as the family do, by Amber – leaving nothing but the answering machine, which contains messages forcing Magnus, Michael and Eve to face up to their past. Magnus and Astrid seem freed and excited by the experience of losing their possessions, their past – Michael also seems to find some redemption. Eve, however, runs away from the family, embarking on a round-the-world tour – eventually ending up in America, where she goes in search of her old family home. "The End" ends, ominously, with Eve seeming to take up Amber's mantle, arriving at someone's house as an uninvited guest. The book then finishes with a short section from Alhambra, reinforcing her connection to the cinema.Sparrow populations, meanwhile, have declined in towns and cities where they used to be common, by 60% since the 70s and Moss said we won’t see one today. Gazing into the reeds now, however, he says: “That looks remarkably like a sparrow. It is a sparrow, how amazing.” The only problem with the brilliance of Astrid as a fictional creation is that it rather makes you wish that the whole novel was hers. Which is not to say that the other characters are exactly bland, only that they don't radiate the same sense of discovery.