The Accidental Book

This was a fun and surprising read with lots of scintillating wonders in its delivery and content. It falls into the box of "experimental writing", but it flows along so fast and spritely compared to many a turgid, self-important postmodern of doorstop dimensions. Ali's opening epigraph from John Berger was a perfect set-up: "Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to tat life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous."

The story is of a dysfunctional London family in summer residence in a rural town in Norfolk, with sections alternately told from the minds of an adult couple, Michael and Eve, and their kids, twelve-year old Astrid and seventeen-year old Magnus. Astrid is largely ignored by her parents and lives in a vibrant fantasy life and projects involving documenting the world with her videocam. Magnus is in a horrible limbo of probation pending investigation of his role in internet bullying of a girl that led to her suicide. Eve is enjoying success as a writer of a series based on ordinary real people who died in World War 2, whom she renders in a fictional rewrite of the life they might had lived. Michael is a professor of Victorian literature, failed poet, and perpetual philanderer targeting his students.

Into their lives comes a stranger, Amber, a 30-something woman appears at their home unannounced:
Sorry I'm late. I'm Amber. Car broke down.

Eve assumes she is one of Michael's student conquests, and Michael assumes she is one of his wife's feminist acolytes. Astrid thrives on the attention she pays her, and Magnus finds solace in her ready grasp of the hell of remorse he is in. Michael is inspired by her ignoring him and smitten into lust and love by her apparent innocence and goodness. Eve is gratified by her taming effects on her kids and challenged to prove her integrity in the face of being told privately by Amber that she is an expert fake. Is Amber a midwife for healthy development of each character or a malevolent, lying manipulator? These questions get more insistent when she destroys Astrid's camera and encourages Magnus' adolescent lusts. The changes in Michael and Eve evolve down strange pathways, a great satire for me who appreciates a humbling of academics prone to getting divorced from the realities of ordinary life.

Interspersed with the episodes on the family are segments told by someone who calls herself Alhambra, named after the movie theater where she was conceived. Her riffs on cinema history and the impact on our culture are marvelous. It seems likely this is Amber, based on what she says she gained from her parents: " From my mother: grace under pressure; the uses of mystery; how to get what I want. From my father: how to disappear, how not to exist."

One three-page mash-up of movie plots at the middle of the book is worth treasuring. Perhaps self-indulgent or perhaps a key to digesting the absurdist twists in the lives of supposedly ordinary people in the narrative. Try a sample and see if it doesn't whet you for the whole piece:

But my father was Alphie, my mother was Isadora. I was unnaturally psychic in my teens, I made a boy fall off his bike and I burned down a whole school. My mother was crazy; she was in love with God. There I was on the alter about to marry someone else when my boyfriend hammered on the church glass at the back and we eloped together on a bus. My mother was furious. She'd slept with him too. The devil got me pregnant and a satanic sect made me go through with it. Then I fell in with some outlaws and did me some talking to the sun. I said I didn't like the way he got things done. I had sex in the back of the old closing cinema. I used butter in Paris. I had a farm in Africa. I took off my clothes in the window of an apartment building and distracted the two police inspectors from watching for the madman on the roof who was trying to shoot the priest. I fell for an Italian. It was his moves on the dancefloor that did it. I knew what love meant. It meant never having to say you're sorry. It meant the man who drove the taxi would kill the presidential candidate, or the pimp. It was soft as an easy chair. It happened so fast. I had my legs bitten off by the shark. I stabbed the kidnapper, but so did everyone else, it wasn't just me, on the Orient Express.

I loved how Astrid's playful, fertile mind was rendered, an internal version of her mother's characterization as "Kicky and impatient, blind as a kitten stupefied by all the knowing and not-knowing". Innocent she may be, but she is the one to put things into perspective toward the end of the book by imaging in detail the apocalypse of an asteroid strike (asteroid she tells us is one letter added to her name). My biggest empathy for the characters goes to him due to Ali's method of portraying his state of guilt over his classmate's suicide and the cold arithmetic behind school's eventual decision to cover it up:

Everyone is broken. …The people talking on all the millions of tvs in the world are all broken, though they seem whole enough. The tyrants are as broken as the people they broke. The people being shot or bombed or burned are broken. The people doing the shooting or the bombing or the burning are equally broken.
…
We are glad to inform you. The matter officially closed.
The end result=they've got away with it.
The end result=no one really wants to know.
…
He can forget it. A simple act of subtraction. Him minus it. He can have his memory erased by a special laser pen-torch, like in Men in Black.

I chock this one up as a bedazzling and wonderful read and recommend it to those who like quirky tales with an underground impact that can catch you unaware. As it is 10 years old, I will eagerly pursue other books from her imaginative mind.