How to read the opening of a novel

let the novel teach you how to read it

Brandon Taylor recently wrote about how to start a novel, his thoughts being inspired by the fact that many creative writing students are not well-read and need more and more guidance on the technical aspects of narrative. You should read his piece in full.

A few years ago, I ran a series of Interintellect salons called How to Read Fiction. We read six novels and used them as a way to learn some fundamental principles of understanding fiction. Persuasion, Silas Marner, A Room with a View, The Death of the Heart, The Remains of the Day, and The Gate of Angels. All great novels.

Here are some of the things we discussed.

• Why does Anne Eliot not get mentioned until the second or third page of Persuasion, and then only in passing? This is her novel, after all. All that time spent discussing Sir Walter and his lineage is not merely background information. As much as Persuasion is a romance, it is a romance about a changing society. It is a novel about consequence: both in the sense of social position and the results of our actions. For both reasons, Anne has been diminished at the start of the story.

• Silas Marner opens like a fairy tale. This is partly to emphasise that time moves faster in the age of technology and commerce, so even a story only one or two generations old has an old-world, fairy-tale feel, but also to emphasise the artificiality of the story itself. Eliot is trying to establish realism as a core principle. There are scenes in Silas Marner when you will feel like you are in the room with real people. That effect is enhanced by her plot, which has the feel of an “old tale”. Change the technology and the religion, she says, people are what they are.

• In A Room with a View, we get an in media res opening. No set-up or description, just straight into dialogue. It takes us a page or two to adjust. Again, this is not done for its own sake. There is a clear pattern to the novel. It takes place across four seasons. The setting is Italy-England-Italy, like sonata formation. “The Signora had no business to do it” is a perfect expression of the novel’s theme: who gets to decide Lucy’s future? Whose business is she? This novel is a battle of the generations, too, and that is expressed in the opening. Forster repeats images, metaphors, and ideas, like the swirls in a carpet, and this begins on the first page.

• The Death of the Heart, one of Elizabeth Bowen’s masterpieces, has a stunning opening paragraph.

  That morning’s ice, no more than a brittle film, had cracked and was now floating in segments. These tapped together or, parting, left channels of dark water, down which swans in slow indignation swam. The islands stood in frozen woody brown dusk: it was now between three and four in the afternoon. A sort of breath from the clay, from the city outside the park, condensing, made the air unclear; through this, the trees round the lake soared frigidly up. Bronze cold of January bound the sky and the land-scape; the sky was shut to the sun — but the swans, the rims of the ice, the pallid withdrawn Regency terraces had an unnatural burnish, as though cold were light. There is something momentous about the height of winter. Steps rang on the bridges, and along the black walks. This weather had set in; it would freeze harder tonight.

  You might take this as mere description. But once you know what The Death of the Heart is about, you will see that this is a series of metaphors and symbols. In every line, every image, Bowen is setting up the themes and trajectory of her novel. The same thing is done in The Tortoise and the Hare, written by Bowen’s friend and admirer Elizabeth Jenkins, who I am convinced was influenced strongly by this book (she preferred it to The Heat of the Day, the Bowen novel that people usually love).

• The Remains of the Day’s opening line—“It seems increasingly likely that I will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days”—is purposively distracting. You would not think that this is as close as he can get to expressing his decades-long love for his former colleague, and that this “expedition” is a hopeless quest to win her over. Once you have finished the novel, turn back to the opening and see how well Ishiguro establishes all the problems that doom his narrator. From the start, he is writing ironically.

• Penelope Fitzgerald is a novelist of precision. Her novels are made up of details. In The Gate of Angels a whole page is given over to detailing the crockery, cutlery, silverware, and so on, that the Edwardian housewife of a vicar has to deal with. It says more than any polemic could do. All of the items described are in a state of disorder, needing washing, cleaning, polishing. This is a novel of topsy-turvy happenings, romantically, scientifically, spiritually. Lives are upended with love, the discovery of atoms, and the presence of God. The ending is an affront to the social order of the college and the scientific order of the laboratory. And in the opening? We have strong winds, bicycles that can hardly make their way down the road, and cows lying on their backs in the meadows.

One of the most important critical principles is to let the novel teach you how to read it. This means being attentive to the way the opening is structured and the details the writer chooses to show us. In a great novel, nothing is there by chance. There might be plenty of unconscious writing, ambiguity, ambivalence, and so on, but before we can talk sensibly about what is implied, we must be clear about what is being said and shown.

I cannot find the reference now, but Elizabeth Bowen once told Charles Ritchie this: everything has to be carefully selected and arranged so it forms part of the integrity of the structure and pattern. Nothing is there merely for description; it all must form a coherence.¹

What I liked about Brandon’s piece is that he was trying to say the same thing in reverse. “I measure the story against itself, and where the story snags, it snags because of incomplete understanding on my part.”

As readers, we must measure the story against itself too.

1. If you happen to have read Ritchie’s diaries and remember this, please tell me.