Penguin, 2012, 357p.

The set-up for this is deeply weird. A man called Miles Garth has locked himself into the hosts’ spare bedroom during a dinner party. He’s there for weeks, fed under the door with wafer thin ham or from the next door neighbour’s house via a pulley. Eventually he becomes a TV news and internet fad.

The narrative is divided into four main parts each named, in order, with the words of the overall book title.

There. Is from the viewpoint of a woman who knew Garth briefly as a teenager on a foreign trip called in by the houseowner since her number was on Garth’s phone.

But. Is told by Mark, the man who brought Garth along to the dinner party. Mark hears his (dead) mother talking to him in rhyme.

For. Focuses on an old woman in hospital, whom Garth always visited once a year.

The. A ten year old girl fascinated by word play turns out to be the person who finally makes contact with Garth.

As in The Accidental, the right hand margin is not justified. This is irritating every time the book is picked up after an interval as its appearance is unpolished – like a manuscript rather than a proper book. Once into the swing of the narrative again it becomes invisible, though.

Ali Smith has appeared in at least one Best New Scottish Writing anthology. There is very little to mark her as a particularly Scottish writer. Only one thing here gives any hint of Scottishness – the use of the description black-affronted.

Among Smith’s stylistic quirks dialogue is not rendered in the usual quotes and she also makes significant use of parentheses (some of which last for pages on end) to recount incidents from the earlier lives of her characters.

While the writing is fine (Smith can do fine writing) the narrative meanders rather and never really goes anywhere. It’s a bit like a collection of short stories with very loose connections between them. And we never really get to find out why Garth locked himself in someone else’s bedroom.

Penguin, 2007, 306p

Reasonably successful writer Eve Smart, her philandering lecturer husband Michael and their family are renting a house in Norfolk when they are intruded upon by a female stranger called Amber, who proceeds to inveigle her way into their home, befriend Eve’s twelve year old daughter Astrid and seduce her teenage son Magnus.

The novel is split into three sections, The Beginning, The Middle and The End in all of which each family member has a narrative strand. Astrid’s narration is initially irritating as she has a habit of using ie (or even id est) in circumstances which do not warrant it. Thankfully, she – or Smith as the author – grows out of this by The End. Each section is preceded, and hence followed, by a framing narrative in the first person from Amber’s viewpoint. (This does not illumine Amber’s behaviour overmuch.) The unravelling of the Smart family’s life under Amber’s influence is the meat of the book.

There are several infelicities. Not only are a couple of characters unsympathetic but the changes of viewpoint initially jar and for a long time the lack of justification in the text irritated me. The ragged right hand margin was too much of a distraction. By The End, though, the characters (apart from Amber) are more established and these concerns fade.

I noticed that the “cloud” on my Library Thing tags this novel as Scottish Fiction. (According to the book’s blurb Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 but now lives in Cambridge.) Fantastic Fiction also designates her as Scottish. There is nothing identifiably Scottish about The Accidental, though; not its setting, its themes, its dialogue nor its vocabulary. Mind you, the same could be said about Allan Massie’s The Sins of the Father or Andrew Crumey’s Music, In a Foreign Language both of which I read recently. Interestingly enough, Library Thing has those two books tagged as Scottish Literature.