PROFILE: Ian McEwan

Photo credits: Randolph Quan.

If you’d asked me, a few years ago, who my favourite living writer was, I would’ve answered without hesitation: Ian McEwan. Circa 2007, McEwan was at the summit of his art and eminence as a novelist: Atonement, probably his best book, had just been turned into a brilliant movie (directed by Joe Wright, starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy), Saturday, his novel about post-9/11 Britain, had been published in 2003 and  confirmed his skill in dealing with contemporary state-of-the-nation feelings, and he had just published a beautiful novella, On Chesil Beach, which was shortlisted for the Booker. Moreover, McEwan had managed to bridge the tricky gap between literary and commercial fiction; his books were on university reading lists and bestseller lists alike.

I read McEwan for the first time that year after seeing the film version of Atonement around Christmas. The truth is, I was probably seeking for a film adaptation of book to fall in love with; the previous Spring I had read and thoroughly enjoyed Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, only to be severely disappointed by the film version, which I’d had so many hopes for. Then came Atonement: beautifully directed, it had important things to say about art, contained big themes like love and war, and its ending was heart wrenching without being melodramatic. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, recommended it to everyone around me, and read the book over Christmas. The novel provided me with a literary mirror for the film. I found it just as great; it had everything I looked for in a book: compelling story, complex characters, beautiful writing. Most importantly, it felt literary (I’d been careful to buy the original paperback with the indignantly bored little girl on the cover, not the movie tie-in edition), which was essential to me at a time when I as trying to define myself as a reader of real literature, but still liked my books to be compelling. I was hooked on McEwan.

When school finished that Spring I read through Saturday, a strange novel that follows its neuro-surgeon protagonist, Dr. Perone, through an ordinary weekend day that turns out to be extremely unordinary. Saturday is a tour-de-force in its ability to manipulate the reader: at the beginning, I thought the story advanced very slowly, with lots of flashbacks and filler material and very little going on, but halfway through the novel I realized how attached I’d become to Perone and his family. By the end, when this family is threatened, the novel turns into a page turner because the McEwan has successfully built an emotional attachment between the reader and his characters. Then, in the fall, I read On Chesil Beach in a couple of days, and the same trick operated: very little actually happens for pages, except you get so close to the characters that by the time the story reaches its climax—a conversation on the beach between two newly-weds who misunderstand each other on the deepest level—I was sitting on the edge of my chair, breathless, whispering words of encouragement and disappointment, depending on what was being said. Again, I was thrilled with the beauty and efficiency of the language, and at how much complexity and characterization McEwan could concentrate in so few pages.

McEwan is a realist. He said so himself at a recent lecture he gave at Harvard (unfortunately, I couldn’t attend—my invitation got lost in the mail), entitled “The Lever: Where Novelists Stand to Move the World.” He’s very careful in his descriptions of places and things and events in order to recreate the right setting for his novels, be it modern-day London or Dunkirk in 1940. Of course, the precepts of realism requires that you describe the real world as faithfully as you can, down to the right constellation, the right brand of cigarette. It’s true that McEwan does this; some passages in his work are almost frustrating in their attention to detail, their desire to describe everything in detail. But where he is truly remarkable is in his ability to stretch reality to its limits, by placing his characters at the edge of normality, in situations that throw them completely off-balance. Sometimes, as in Atonement, where a little girl’s lie threatens to destroy the lives of two lovers, the results are stunning. Other times, as with the two loony lawbreakers in Saturday, coincidences seem a little bit exaggerated and the plot, like dough stretched too tightly between two hands, becomes torn. Yet as Alice Munro once said of another author, the writer always wins in the end. This is especially true of McEwan: even when he carefully walks you through a plot that seems implausible, he usually catches you with the elegance, restraint, and creativity of his writing. Usually. 

There are still those who argue in favor of early McEwan (see the hilarious book trailer for Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story), but I have a feeling that, in some time, when McEwan will have passed away (although I wish him long life!) and critics look back on his work, the three novels of his I first discovered—Atonement, Saturday, On Chesil Beach—will be considered his best. Here’s a writer at the top of his form, perfectly in control of his art, but still discovering things about writing, experimenting with voice and form and plot. Previously, McEwan had written a lot of books—just under a dozen, by my count—including two collections of short stories. Among these were Enduring Love, which still ranks among some of his best work (I haven’t read it yet so I can’t say), The Innocent (a kind of emotional spy-novel, set in Berlin during the Cold War), and his booker-winning Amsterdam, which frankly is not great by any standard (the conclusion seems to be that 1998 was a very bad year for fiction in English). McEwan’s early work earned him the nickname “macabre,” because of his unrestrained descriptions of gore. In The Innocent, for example, the main character needs to get rid of the body of someone he’s accidentally killed; a very long description of how to cut up a corpse into pieces and carry these pieces out of an ensues (a scene, as it turns out, that he now regrets). McEwan became relatively well-known in the 90s, but this was nothing like the stellar reputation he would gain in the early 2000s with the three books I mentioned above.

Then he published a new novel, Solar, in 2010, which I looked forward to and took a break from school readings to enjoy. Except I was disappointed. McEwan knew what he was doing in this novel—which is a kind of satire about climate change, featuring a ruthless, obese, nobel-prize winning physicist—but he knew it too well. The writing is too polished and self-conscious, the plot seems stretched, and the humor falls flat. The novel is so neat it feels dead. McEwan will be publishing a new novel this summer, Sweeth Tooth, a return to the spy genre he’d flirted with in The Innocent. An excerpt, entitled “Hand on the Shoulder,” about a young woman’s recruitment into MI5 by professor and lover in Cambridge in the 1970s, was published this week in The New Yorker. It provides usual McEwan fare: light irony, play with memory, importance of authenticity, interesting descriptions of food and sex… But again, I felt a little short-changed when I read. In an effort to make everything seem logical, plausible, McEwan describes emotions in too much detail; plot points are sold paragraphs in advance, so all you’re left to wallow in as a reader are feelings. And feelings only go so far. Am I evolving as a reader? or is McEwan really regressing as a writer? If the answer to the latter question is yes, then McEwan’s writer’s career fits into what Rick Gekoski has recently described as a usual curve of ascent into maturity and descent until death. Most author’s, Gekoski argues, rarely publish their best work last. But there are exceptions—Philip Roth, Henry James—and perhaps McEwan will count among them. Only time will tell. 

Long & Short: The Return of the Novella

The original, 1937 cover for Of Mice and Men

I write “return” with a degree of critical care. Did the novella ever leave? If yes, why had it gone? Or maybe it was never really big at all, and therefore isn’t making a return so much as a début. All of this is unclear to me. But what has become definitely apparent is that there’s been a recent surge in interest for novellas. The form is infamously tricky to define, of course. A novella is supposed to be book-length, because it can be published on its own, but not quite novel-length. But then, does the novella exist at all? Maybe it’s just a long short story, or else a short novel. In terms of content and form — this has nothing to do with length — I have certainly found this true on some occasions. Some novellas, like Ethel Wilson’s “Tuesday and Wednesday” and “Lily’s Story,” which are collected in her Equations of Love, feel like short stories that have been inflated. In terms of emotional resonance and narrative breadth, they remain, well, a little short. Other novellas, like James’ The Aspern Papers, are much shorter than novels, but pack the punch of longer, more ambitious works.

 

Some clues as to the return of the novella:

To begin with, there was Julian Barnes’ first Booker victory in October with The Sense of and Ending, which was the shortest book on the shortlist, and has been called a novella by some. Also, last year, the Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris inaugurated the Paris Literary Prize to celebrate the novella, which is awarded to a work of fiction between 20,000 and 30,000 words. And let’s remember how much ink was spilled a few years ago about Robert Bolano’s posthumous masterpiece 2666, which is really 5 interlinked novellas. Also, the American short story genius Jim Shepard’s most recent collection, You Think That’s Bad, contained a novella titled “Gojira, King of the Monsters”, which was also published separately as a stand-alone book. As for publishing houses, Penguin has of course recently had a lot of success with elegant collections of short books: Penguin Great Ideas, Penguin English Journeys, Penguin Great Loves… Last year, they came out with Mini Modern Classics, 50 short pieces of fiction, published as their own, lovely little books, to celebrate 50 years of Penguin Classics. What’s great about the selection is that the editors have generally chosen little-known stories; letting them stand on their own gives them some well-deserved visibility. To be fair, a lot of the stories that make up the books in the series are actually short stories, not novellas. Moreover, from what I can see most of the volumes collect more than one story. Borges’ The Widow Ching—Pirate, for instance, also includes 5 other stories from the Argentine master. The design for the collection is very nice, playing off the silver, black, and white of the traditional Penguin Modern Classics, with much bigger author pictures on the back covers. Penguin has also released 5 production videos for the series: they’re great fun to watch.

More directly novella-related, perhaps, Melville House, which is becoming increasingly renowned for great books and great designs, has published a collection of books called The Art of the Novella, featuring, among many others, Jacob’s Room, by Virginia Woolf, The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville, and 5 different stories entitled The Duel (by Casanova, Checkhov, Conrad, von Kleist, and Kuprin). The whole series is a great idea, and is perfectly executed: the choice is varied and classic, and the designs are remarkably simple and fresh. Their selection is sometimes a little wobbly in terms of form, however: I’m not entirely sure The Hounds of the Baskerville, for instance, is usually considered to be a novella, but that’s another story…

All this attention on novellas is wonderful; for one thing, novellas are awesome. They’re short enough to be read in a few sittings and to be quite focused aesthetically, but they’re also long enough that they have the time to creep into the brain of the reader; they cut out their own space and demand that their issues be addressed. I have a short-standing theory that the act of reading happens en deux temps. Maybe this only happens to me, but I feel like I always need a short period of adaptation when I start reading a book, not really to get used to the characters and the setting so much as to adjust my reader’s ear to the rhythm of the writer’s voice and the linguistic rules of the book’s universe. I believe this is why I can’t immerse myself completely in a book and read long swaths of it in one sitting until I’ve passed a certain point (sometimes this point comes early, sometimes later, never after the midway point) — then all is well and I can drive on to the end, perfectly attuned to the story’s music. The advantage with novellas is that they’re so short and well-formed that even a reading en deux temps can occur quickly. You can begin with two or three short sittings to start immersing yourself in the world of the story bit by bit, like a swimmer gradually dipping his limbs deeper and deeper in cold water, and then finish off the rest of the story in a single, smooth dive. The novella invites you to do all of that in one day, or even a few hours. Ideally, I would suggest leaving a night’s sleep in the middle to allow the shift to occur and finish the novella the next day — it makes the experience last longer. 

Long-winded, baggy novels are great, but I have a particular fondness for the tight focus of short books. Among my favorite novellas are Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, Alice Munro’s ”A Queer Streak”, Mann’s Death in Venice, James Joyce’s “The Dead”, Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, Henry James’ ”The Lesson of the Master”, Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Disinherited”, Maupassant’s Boule de Suif, and Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. Some of these straddle the line with the short story or the novel, but the long and short of it is that they’re just the right length. Plus, they’re all exquisite and quick to revisit. Between lengthy dinners and short shopping sprees, why don’t we all dip into a novella for the Holidays? Happy reading!

A Feast of Reading

Cheers to xelgend.blogspot.com, where I found this awesome image!

Other than books and reading, one of my great interests is food. I like to eat, I like to cook, I like to watch cooking shows, learn how to cook new things, go to the restaurant, try new foods, and plan meals. It was only natural that, at some point, these two passions — reading, eating — would intersect. My literary-cum-culinary obsession has nothing to do with cookbooks or bibliophagy; rather, it’s an interest in food as described within books. I’m always intrigued, and sometimes fascinated, whenever food is mentioned in a novel or a story — even if only in passing — and I often feel a deep urge to taste whatever the food in question is.

Here’s an example. In the beginning of A Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s memoirs of Paris in the 1920s, Hemingway goes to a café to write. He orders a plate of oysters and a glass of white wine. He describes eating “the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture.” This wonderful passage is the reason why I began eating oysters. Hemingway is great on food, by the way. Among my favorite of his culinary passages is the description of the rabbit cooked with onions and red wine in For Whom the Bell Tolls, and raw tuna Santiago eats while he’s out on his boat in The Old Man and the Sea: “He picked up a piece and put in his mouth and chewed it slowly. It was not unpleasant. Chew it well, he thought, and get all the juices. It would not be bad to eat with a little lime or with lemon or with salt.”

"Still Life with Oysters", by Gustabe Caillebotte (1881).

My interest in food description in books began when I read Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events as a child. In one of the books, I think it was The Ersatz Elevator, something called salmon puffs are featured during a reception. Salmon puffs. They weren’t described in detail and they weren’t important to the plot, and yet the very name made my mouth water for flaky, fishy goodness. I moved on from there, longing, in Tolkien, for the seed-cakes Bilbo “had baked that afternoon for his after-supper morsel” in The Hobbit, and for Lembas bread in The Lord of the Rings (who hasn’t), and of course for the rabbit stew Sam makes with the coneys Gollum brings him in the chapter entitled “Of Herbs and Stewed Rabbit”. Strange, I know, but then a lot of literary fetichism is.

Now I can’t help but notice when food is described (or even just mentioned) in fiction. One of my favourite writers on food is Ian McEwan, who mentions food in his books in a consistently interesting way. In Atonement, there’s the roast and potatoes served at the country house in the first section of the novel, which the cook has to turn into cold cuts and salad because the weather is too warm; in On Chesil Beach, Edward and Florence spend their first evening as a married couple eating “a slice of melon decorated by a single glazed cherry (…), slices of long-ago roasted beef in thickened gravy, soft boiled vegetables, and potatoes of a bluish hue.” The novel takes place in 1962, and McEwan adds that “this was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine, but no one much minded at the time, except visitors from abroad.” I also love (and, in some ways, abhor) the last few pages of Solar, in which the obese main character, traveling to New Mexico, wolfs down a strange dish (an invention of McEwan’s) made up of “four wedges of skinless chicken breast, interleaved with three minute steaks, the whole wrapped in bacon, with a honey and cheese topping, and served with twice-roasted potatoes already impregnated with butter and cream cheese.” However, the McEwan food reference I prefer is in Saturday, in which the protagonist, Dr. Perowne, cooks up a memorable fish stew, lovingly described in all the details of its making: “He has now, he reckons, about two and a half litres of bright orange stock which he’ll cook for another five minutes. Just before dinner, he’ll reheat it, and simmer the clams, monkfish, mussels and prawns in it for ten minutes. They’ll eat the stew with brown bread, salad and red wine.” (McEwan put the recipe up on his website, by the way.)

Dickens is another great author on food. It’s always mentioned in passing, but with Dickens’ usual passionate verve. I’ve always wished I could taste the punch that Mr. Micawber specializes in making in David Copperfield, or the “two prodigious lobsters”, the “enormous crab”, and the “large canvas bag of shrimps” that Mr Peggotty brings to David. Or how could anyone forget the pudding Mrs Cratchit makes in a A Christmas Carol, ”like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.” And then there are the pies, of course. It seems that in Dickens the word pie is like a burning brand, a miracle; he just needs to say the word and you can imagine the thick, golden pastry and the juicy meats inside, and the hot little pie-shops with their windows foggy with condensation. In David Copperfield there’s a “beefsteak pie (…) curiously flavoured (…) by a miscellaneous taste of tea, coffee, butter, bacon, cheese, new loaves, firewood, candles, and walnut ketchup, continually ascending from the shop”, and of course, how could I not mention the “beautiful round compact pork pie” Pip brings Magwich at the beginning of Great Expectations! I’m not sure how I would react to seeing the actual pie, but reading about it certainly makes my mouth water…

What about you? Have books every made you hungry for anything?

An illustration of Mr. Micawber mixing punch in Charles Dickens' "David Copperfield". Back then, punch was a drink of rum, lemon, and sugar, served warm.

Old Ladies’ Fiction

Muriel Spark: Older lady extraordinaire.

I’ve recently been working on a personal writing project that involves a number of female characters of a rather advanced age. To inspire myself, I’ve been plunging into a few books in which old ladies figure prominently, in order to see how one goes about writing about them. Old ladies may seem like a little bit bland, as far as subjects go, but I’ve found they can be really instructive, interesting characters, with lots of good stuff hidden away if you know where to look. And, of course, there’s nothing like going to the masters to see how it’s done.

It’s struck me that some authors are very good at writing about old age, while others are really good at doing children. Think of how pitch-perfect Briony is in the first part of Ian McEwan’s  Atonement, as the little girl who sees things and interprets them in her fantasizing, childish mind. The scenes in which Briony interacts with her cousins, the flirty Lola and the twins Pierrot and Jackson, are particularly sharp and witty. A writer who consistently inserts children, usually little girls, in her stories is Elizabeth Bowen. There’s nothing adorable, or even vaguely witty, about her children however; they’re usually eerily quite and observant, and lie on the fringe of the action. With their budding, confused reactions to the world around them, they serve as foils of innocence to the adult characters and their deceits and manipulations.

As for the writers who are good at depicting old age, Alice Munro comes to mind, probably because she’s become a charming old lady herself. Another one is Margaret Atwood, whose careful descriptions of the narrator’s failing, aging body in The Blind Assassin feel so painfully real. The main advantage of writing about an older character is having all these layers to access, because the character has lived through so much. The writer can then delve into the past, these memories and experiences, peeling away the layers in order to reveal meaning. The Blind Assassin, with its layered, russian-doll style storytelling, works in exactly that way. Another book I love about an aging woman is Love, Again by Doris Lessing, which tells the story of a widow in her sixties who falls in love (and the deep, sensual stirrings that involves) all over again. It’s a very beautiful, intense book, which depicts the emotional strain of infatuation and longing vividly, although the story fell away a bit at the end. Lessing is, of course, a fascinating old lady herself, unassuming and frank to the point of bluntness. You’ve only got to see this video of her being told she’s just won the Nobel Prize for literature, in 2008, to see just how charmingly honest she can be. “One can only get as excited as one can get.”

Love, Again's cover has an elegant simplicity and frankness which mirrors both the book, it's author.

One of the old lady novels I read recently is a British classic: Memento Mori, but Muriel Spark. The novel begins most wonderfully with a group of elderly people in London receiving mysterious phone calls. “Remember you must die,” says the voice, and then hangs up. It doesn’t take much else to get the elders fussing and plotting, blackmailing each other and toying with their testaments. What makes the novel interesting is how they all remember or find out about old secrets that had better remain in their dusty cupboards. The novel’s action revolves around the phone calls themselves, but all the reading pleasure comes out of this gossip passed over and picked at by all the characters.  Memento Mori provides a fast-paced, hilarious read, full of insane characters that come to life on the page in all their flawed glory. There are no mild, sweet old ladies letting themselves quietly crumble away here. These women are fighters: “Being over seventy,” one of them remarks, “is like being engaged in a war. All our friends are going or gone and we survive amongst the dead and the dying as one a battlefield.” 

I love this vintage cover for Memento Mori. It's just as elegant and fun as the novel itself.

The second book I turned to was Reading in Bed, by Sue Gee, which isn’t really about old women so much as about older women — bright, modern, well-read professionals somewhere in that healthy, comfortable place between middle and old age. Except lots of not so good things are happening to Georgia and Dido, the two friends at the center of the book. One copes with the death of a husband, her narcissistic 20 year old daughter, and a demented old relative out in Sussex; the other with possibly fatal health problems, a husband showing dangerous signs of infidelity, and a daughter in law who refuses to fit in with her “perfect” family. Lots of drama here. So much drama you never really get attached to the characters because so many terrible, moral-quaking things are being thrown at them from all sides. Sue Gee’s prose could saved the book from being disappointing — it’s loud and full of voice, the narrator oddly present and carefully colloquial — except the intrusions become a little bit annoying halfway through, as if the narrator is constantly trying to convince the reader to sympathize for the characters by constantly pitying them. Poor Georgia. Poor Dido. All in all, I think the whole thing didn’t hold together properly because it sounded too soft and desperate. In the end, the story blew away rather uninterestedly. Just like so many things in real life, actually — except novel can’t be too much like real life, or else they wouldn’t be interesting.

Even with a crafted style and a nice title, Reading in Bed wasn't all I thought it would be. Too bad. The cover is pretty feminine, however; maybe I wasn't the target audience.

The Craft of First Lines

Is it as easy to judge a book by its first line as it is to judge it by its cover? Speaking of covers, this is a really beautiful one: simple and stunning.

David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King will shortly be coming out. I won’t be reading it, at least not soon, but I remain greatly intrigued by the author. David Foster Wallace suffered from severe clinical depression for most of his life, and hanged himself in 2008. He is widely recognized as one of the most original and prominent American writers of his generation. If you’re interested, there’s a very good Charlie Rose interview with Wallace, dating from 1997, which showcases Wallace’s intelligence quite vividly. Watch it here.

The opening sentence of The Pale King was released online a couple of weeks ago in The Millions. It looks like this:

Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-​brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a.m. heat: shattercane, lamb’s‑quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-​print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek.

Now, I haven’t read much of Wallace’s work, but it seems quite clear to me that these opening lines are almost perfect. The first word creates a movement and a direction, as the reader is immediately drawn into what the protagonist sees. The following descriptions have an uncertain beauty to them (“blacktop graphs”, “canted rust”, “tobacco-brown” and so on) which mirrors the imperfect beauty of the landscape being described. But the language is still luscious; take the “weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water”, which is such a gorgeous image, bursting with truth and life. The details root the vision in the moment and place, and yet the movement introduced with the first word continues throughout with the introduction of “the place beyond the windbreak”, a destination, of sorts, or maybe just a kind of mirage, “shimmer[ing] shrilly in the a.m. heat”, a place you’d like to get to but cannot. I just used a “you” there on purpose — the inclusion of the “you” at the end of the sentence is brilliant, throwing the reader’s gaze, which had been wandering past all those weeds and into the distance, right back to him/her and his/her personal, sensuous experience. It all ends with the simile of “a mother’s soft hand on your cheek”, which is at once modest and universal. Of course, there’s also that long enumeration, which may put off some readers (I know I sometimes unconsciously skip over lists when I read) but which, I think, really brings this piece of writing to life. Lists are a strange literary tool, with a kind of hypnotic power, relevant in this case since The Pale King is supposed to have boredom as one of its themes. I am reminded, for instance, of the catalogue of ships in the Iliad, which is so potent at conjuring what it enumerates. Lists offer the most perfect form of realism, because they can’t leave anything out.

Lists can be really interesting and poetic, I swear. Even Umberto Eco says so.

Looking at the first sentence of Wallace (especially in isolation, without everything that follows) has got me thinking about the first lines in books and how tricky they are. Many people will tell you first lines are an essential part of books, and you can often tell a good book by the quality of its first sentence. There are loads of examples of fine first sentences, but I think the incontestable master is Gabriel García Márquez, who consistently begins his novels with elegant, thoughtful, fascinating, and memorable lines. Take the famous first sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” Here’s the first sentence of Memories of My Melancholy Whores, equally delicious, although I found the novel itself a little disappointing: “The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.” Or have a look at the first sentence of Love in the Time of Cholera, which is so contemplative, full of quiet potential: “It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.” A master of the craft of first lines, there is no doubt.

As the examples above illustrate, good first sentences must, I think, must bring the reader in media res, that is, in the middle of things — and here, we return to Homer, who begins his Iliad and Odyssey in a similar fashion. Beginning your story this way ignites curiosity in the reader, who will naturally jump to the next sentence to answer the questions which arise out of the first. Ian McEwan usually writes unremarkable first sentences, but I think his opening for On Chesil Beach was an exception. It’s pitch perfect, albeit a tad tortuous: “They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.” Makes you want to read more? I certainly do. Other fine examples can be found in The Golden Bowl, by Henry James (“The Prince had always liked his London, when it had come to him…”) and Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (“One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it: — it was the black kitten’s fault entirely.”)

 

When the sentence is that good, why not wear it as jewelry?

Then there’s that very strange kind of first sentence which can act independently as a kind of proverb. Two examples of this are still very well known: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” and “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Although these stand very well on their own, I don’t like them too much in the context of the book (despite the biting irony which emerges from the Pride and Prejudice example) because they feel disconnected from what follows. They’re so good and they reveal so much information and truth from the start, that you feel like you’re starting the story all over again with the second sentence. Henry James begins The Portrait of a Lady in a similar way: “Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.” Wonderful, but not altogether intriguing, I find.

There are also some first lines which are really only decent, but fit so well within the works they begin that they act as a kind of microcosm of these works, and have become famous in and of themselves. I think the first line of James Joyce’s Ulysses is definitely one of these: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” I really love the opening pages of the novel, they have a quick pace, they’re full of life and wit and the prose is dazzling, but is the first sentence particularly good? Does it stand very well on its own? Does it compel the reader to keep on reading? Well, not really. I’m not so sure “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan” would be so remarkable if it didn’t introduce one of the greatest and most influential novels of the 20th century. The first sentence of Out of Africa — “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of Ngong Hills.” — is elegant and simple, like much of the book, but it strikes me as being similar to the first sentence of Ulysses in that it only bears interest in light of the entire book. It’s still a fine sentence though, and very well used in the movie adaption (I can hear Meryl Streep’s voice when I read it now, in that low-pitched Swedish accent she gave herself for the movie).

Whenever I start reading a new book, I always hope I’ll be pleased by the first sentence. It’s hit or miss. The first sentence of The Old Man and the Sea still gives me shivers: “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.” Stunning. A last favourite of mine is the opening page of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which I find so rhythmic and engrossing: “I am always drawn back to the places where I have lived, the houses and their neighbourhoods…” Sometimes I get really disappointed if the beginning of a book could’ve had a really fantastic first sentence, but the author put something plain and not particularly attractive instead — for instance, I can’t understand why Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori doesn’t begin from the very first line with the alarming phone call: “Remember you must die.” It’s a little bit frustrating, a kind of missed opportunity.

I’m bound, of course, to find loads more fine first sentences as time passes; it’s something I like to keep an eye out for. If you know of any other good ones, by all means, please share them!