Pastoral

In Ali Smith’s The Accidental (2005), during the Smart family’s holiday to rural Norfolk, the youngest child, Astrid, experiences an environmental awakening. At the beginning of their trip, the countryside appears empty to her. From the window of their rented house, she observes that ‘you can see for miles. Except there is nothing to see here; trees and fields and that kind of thing’ (Smith 2005, 10). Conditioned by her urban experience, she fails to register any meaningful point of reference. Later, though, tasked with recording the passing of a minute in time in the village on her video camera, she realises that while the closed-circuit television camera that she has trained her viewfinder on is ‘doing nothing’, her footage is in fact crowded with detail: birds flying, insects working, plants moving in the breeze and even – ‘in a way that can’t be seen by the human eye’ – growing. Struck by the layers of activity ‘all happening in its own world which exists on its own terms in this one even if someone like Astrid doesn’t know about it or hasn’t found out about it yet’, she reflects that she ‘has never really noticed how green things are before’ (127–128). ¹