Review by Natalie Clark

Endlessly falling in love with literary heroines is a guilty pleasure of mine and Amber in Ali Smith’s fantastic novel The Accidental provides a sustaining allure throughout this engaging novel. From the eponymous heroine of Anna Karenina to John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman, I have been provided with the perfect seductive folly of an ambiguous and enchanting female protagonist – albeit a heroines that seduce the male lead (and his reader accomplice) into a disastrous and cruel denouement. It is not only male writers who provide us with femme fatales who embody the devilment of the sexual woman, it was a regular motif in Du Maurier’s work and is epitomised not only in the thrice killed Rebecca, but less infamously in My Cousin Rachel. Such women leave heartache in their wake, in the fictional hearts of their male counterparts and in the fictionalised longings of readers such as myself. It seems the writer is duty bound to heap an eternalised punishment on such uppity women to preserve a sanctified dominant ideology in the male literary canon.

Ali Smith feels no such compunction. Shaking literary convention with an irony, warmth and wit, Smith draws us to the bosom of a malfunctioning middle-class family that is searching for excitement and provides them with a truly disinterested demonised woman. The rebellious and enigmatic Amber gives out all the warning signs of a female in need of a healthy dose of punitive penmanship but, instead of following this well worn path, Smith gives us a lesson in the real villainy and the mendaciousness of human nature.

This book is a breathless treat and a perceptive snapshot of the lies people tell each other but, most of all, it freeze-frames, zooms in and develops the lies we tell ourselves. It is a novel that gently teases its readers’ for a childish crush and irrevocably assures us that the forbidden fruit in fiction is much less enchanting in real life.

The Accidental by Ali Smith (Penguin, £7.99) is out now.

Natalie Clark is a glorified cat cushion. She has a Cultural History MRes and is doing 20th Century Literature MA at Manchester University.

Review by Linda Aloysius

In Morvern Callar, Alan Warner effectively updates the critique of femininity’s relation to commerce that Gustave Flaubert provided in Madame Bovary. This is a far from obvious update, but undeniable once seen.

Both heroines have potentially doomed, but differing, relationships with consumerism. Emma Bovary eventually dies through suicide induced by the psychological effects of consumption beyond her means. Morvern Callar, conversely, finds liberation from her living death as a supermarket assistant. Both heroines are from working class backgrounds, both live in localised communities estranged from the mainland. Both women rarely speak. Emma siphons off her husband’s material possessions whilst Morvern appropriates her boyfriend’s intellectual property. Each woman suffers, deeply, in longing for a sensual life not afforded by their financial circumstances and for what this confers to the expression of their repressed femininity.

But, whereas Flaubert chose to sadistically create a life of tortured longing for Emma Bovary, finally punishing her desires and her femininity with gruesome death by suicide, Warner demands something positive – indeed, every positive thing – for women: sensual experience; intellectual stimulation; freedom to create and to procreate; freedom from conventional judgment and from oppression generally (particularly male oppression) and freedom to live as one chooses.

Moreover, Warner, in having Morvern eventually become a writer, reverses a long established trend that relied on actual or near death of a female character in order that a man could succeed as an author: Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant; the films Betty Blue; The Shining; Moulin Rouge – each of these works involve the death of a female, whether social death by enforced invisibility or physical death itself, to secure male authorship. Warner, in his capacity as a writer, gives to Morvern Callar the ability to write whilst killing off her would-be-author boyfriend, so returning to his heroine the creative freedom that she inspires in him. Warner’s is a small, largely unrecognised, but deeply heroic act. It deserves our reading.

Morvern Callar by Alan Warner (Vintage, £7.99) is out now.

Linda Aloysius is an artist living in London. She is currently researching her PhD in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College.