First-rate firsts

It has become something of a truism among writers’ groups and in articles offering advice on how best to secure the services of an agent or publisher that the opening of a novel is everything — the ne plus ultra of the writer’s armoury. If one can knock the reader’s socks off with the first few lines one is almost there. So I’ve decided to conduct an experiment. Before reading any of these four first novels to the end, I shall compare and mark their opening couple of pages.

First in line (and chosen entirely at random) is Michela Wrong’s Borderlines. Miss Wrong (you’ll find no silly jokes from me here) has been writing non-fiction books about Africa for years. This is her first try at a novel. She opens with a scene on a plane which stands in for her heroine’s life story. A woman falls asleep in her seat. She awakes to a bump. At first she thinks the plane has struck something and that they are about to crash. But no. They are merely landing. This false assumption sums up her life. ‘Some people are just a bit slow to catch on,’ she reassures herself. A good opening. Makes one want to read on. Ten out of ten.

Next is Natasha Pulley’s The Watchmaker of Filigree Street. Set in late 19th-century England, this is the debut of a graduate from the famous creative writing course (think this year’s Man Booker prize longlist nominee Anne Enright, and veteran Booker hands Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan) at my old alma mater, the University of East Anglia. Pulley begins conventionally enough — no natty little prologues for her. She describes, in spare prose, the Home Office Telegraphy Department. Nothing much happens. There are no surprises. One supposes she does this on purpose, the better to introduce her first main character, Thaniel Steepleton, whose own colours (Steepleton is a synesthete who sees musical notation, for instance, in the shape of colours) are ‘mainly grey’.