H Hamilton £12.99 pp306

Here it is, Ali Smith’s first full-length novel, and it is as good as anyone who has been watching the progress of this talented author could possibly have hoped. In her stories, and in the fragments that made up Hotel World, Smith has already given ample evidence of her linguistic virtuosity and penetrating intelligence. Now she has found a narrative structure to contain those gifts, and the result is an outstanding novel, at once dazzlingly bright and profoundly dark.

The character who sets everything moving was conceived in 1968 in a cinema, after which she is named Alhambra. The film out of which her mother walked in order to seduce the barman was Poor Cow, starring Terence Stamp. But it’s from another of Stamp’s films of that year, one not named here, that Smith seems to have borrowed her plot. In Pasolini’s Theorem a vagrant who may be an angel, or a criminal maniac (or both), makes an inexplicable appearance in the home of an apparently commonplace family. As played by the androgynously beautiful young Stamp, the mysterious visitor is sexually irresistible. His presence is troubling at every level. By the time he leaves, the repressions and compromises that protected the peaceful normality of his hosts’ lives have been stripped away, leaving them bewildered and half mad.

Smith’s version of this archetypal fable is less mystical than Pasolini’s, but funnier. The family on whose doorstep Alhambra appears one hot August morning in 2003 is, as Smith remarks, “four-square” — mother, father, 17-year-old son, 12-year-old daughter. The story is told from each of their points of view in turn (but in a subtly ironic third person). For each of them Smith has a distinctive voice and an appropriate narrative strategy. Pre-pubescent Astrid does stream of consciousness. Michael, a teacher of English literature and serial seducer of students (or, while on holiday in Norfolk, supermarket checkout girls), holds forth as though to a lecture-room before lapsing suddenly, to his own and the readers’ delight, into Byronic ottava rima. Eve, the mother and breadwinner, who is fully aware of Michael’s promiscuity and has made a decision not to mind, interviews herself, warily refusing over-pertinent questions (she is the author of popular semi-fictionalised historical biographies in which nothing, not even death, is allowed to be too upsetting). Poor Magnus, the maths whiz whose intellectual vanity has been the indirect cause of a fellow sixth-former’s suicide and who is, at the beginning of the book, in real despair, approaches his own predicament as a calculation beyond his capacity — one requiring an as yet unimagined theorem.

In each of these modes Smith produces a tour de force. She exactly conveys the workings of Astrid’s mind — so vulnerable and yet so smartarsed, so callow and yet so lucidly critical of the adult world. Then comes Michael, whose ruminations on — for instance — the cliché (“something dainty fumbled at through thick gloves”) are delicious for their real verbal ingenuity, but also for Smith’s doubled cleverness in allowing us to relish Michael ’s intellectual caracoles while simultaneously laughing at him for being such an emotional idiot. By the time we move on to Eve, whose reflections on her comfortable lifestyle provide exquisitely tart social comedy, it is beginning to look as though there is probably nothing by way of fiction writing that Smith can’t do. She even manages to make Alhambra, the mysterious visitor, saltily comic. “I found him in the bathroom trying to hang himself,” she says of Magnus: “We’ll be away about an hour, long enough for me to ravish him sexually” (Magnus again). What she says is true, but the rest of the family, incredulous, laugh like crazy, and so, for different reasons, do we.

Lavishly discursive within its sturdy frame, this is a novel that touches on Iraq and on early bereavement, on the urban middle-class’s sentimental rural fantasies and on forgiveness, on the potential of the word “and” and on the end of the world. Smith has written a proper novel with a beginning, a middle and an end, but turned it into an exuberantly inventive series of variations. At her beginning, each character is facing some kind of dead end. By the end, everything, including the story of the stranger on the doorstep, is ready to begin again. And in the middle is a fable as beautifully formed and as astringently intelligent as her barefoot delinquent angel.

Available at the Books First price of £10.39 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist