an opening sentence--in depth

Last Thursday, when I went to visit my mother for lunch, she had a bag of books resting in the front hall, ready to be taken off to a thrift store for charitable resale. The top book in the bag was the paperback version of The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. Never having read the book, I picked it up to have a look.

Of course I'm aware that The Da Vinci Code is one of the best-selling books of all time (I recall a figure of 40 million copies sold). It alone will have made its author a multi-millionaire. It didn't even appear in paperback until the release of the movie version last year, so the book will have been a particularly rich source of revenue for Dan Brown.

Good for him: I salute anyone who can do well at writing. I also think he did not deserve to be sued by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, two of the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, a key source of ideas for The Da Vinci Code. Unless The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was intended as a work of fiction, they were wrong to sue him, and I'm glad he won.

I have undergone a fair amount of angst ever since I heard about The Da Vinci Code, since I am making use of many of the same ideas (I think) in my own work; I too was inspired and fascinated by The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, and felt a huge uprushing of creative energy when I read it in 1994. The fact that Dan Brown "got there first" and hit such incredible pay-dirt with this material I found troubling and dispiriting. Partly for that reason, I didn't want to read or even look at The Da Vinci Code until I had finished my own book.

While Mom heated up some homemade beef soup for us to eat, I perused the opening scene of chapter 1 and we talked about the book (Mom herself could not get into it, and bailed after the first few chapters). I thought I would express some of my findings here in my blog.

First: the novel opens with a dramatic prologue--a device I generally frown on, as I have pointed out in previous posts (such as this one). Usually a dramatic (as opposed to expository) prologue is a "grabber" intended to hook the interest of the reader, who otherwise might find the story starting at chapter 1 to be too boring. Typically it contains a murder scene or other shocking or surprising element, and is intended to make the reader wonder more about the world of the story. The bad thing here is that the writer is himself sending the signal that he's afraid his story opens in a boring way. The writer thinks the story is boring--not good. Following my usual policy in assessing a novel, I skipped the prologue. I understand there is some kind of albino geek in the book who kills people, and I expect the prologue contains the first of those killings.

On to chapter 1 proper, then. I don't have the book in front of me (got to pick it up from Mom's place), so I can only quote the first sentence verbatim:

Robert Langdon awoke slowly.

I'll start with that. I'll go into some detail, because I think first sentences are important--I often use them to decide whether I want to read on.

Overall, I think it's a fairly weak first sentence. Not terrible, perhaps, but not great. It tells us four things: that there is a character called Robert Langdon; that he was asleep; that he is now waking up; and that he is waking up slowly, as opposed to quickly. In storytelling terms, let's see what this does for us.

Robert Langdon: Character names are important. This is a fairly bland, Anglo name--no crime in itself; there are no doubt many Robert Langdons in the world living worthwhile lives. But it doesn't give us as much of a sense of character as might a less colorless name. How might you feel if the book had opened with

Myron Berkowitz awoke slowly ?

or

Oliver Mbehele awoke slowly ?

or

Luz Fernandez awoke slowly ?

Differently, no? Of course, we don't know anything about these characters either, but they provoke us into imagining backgrounds for them a bit more--we have the beginnings of expectations about them, expectations that may well be defeated by the story, but that will create subtle tensions within us, tensions that are, in my view, synonymous with interest. Robert Langdon right off the bat has a harder job in getting us to imagine him as vivid and real. Is he a banker? A blue-collar worker? A drug dealer? No way of knowing as yet. He's a blank slate.

Next: awoke. That's okay--awoke is a perfectly fine verb. It tells us he was sleeping, an activity we can all relate with. We're willing to extend the narrator credit that the fact Langdon was sleeping may be important for some reason.

then: slowly. Hm. Why modify the verb awoke here? Presumably it matters that he awoke slowly as opposed to quickly or "normally". To me it suggests deep unconsciousness, or perhaps the gentleness of the stimulus that awakens him. I might be awoken slowly by a soft breeze starting to move through my Mexican beach cabana, for instance. Or I might awaken slowly after taking sleeping pills, or being knocked unconscious.

It will turn out that Langdon was indeed deeply asleep in a Paris hotel room, tired from giving a lecture earlier on. But I don't find that this opening sentence tells me much of use or interest about the scene. It is utilitarian; I get the feeling that it is simply something to communicate the name of the main character. The transition from sleep to waking is symbolically powerful, and could be heavily charged. Another (very different) novel that opens with a character waking up--or rather with the dream from which he awakes--is Gravity's Rainbow, which opens famously thus:

A screaming comes across the sky.

When I first read this I wasn't sure what it meant, but I did get a sense of uncanniness and danger--a bit of the dread of having a bomb or missile approach. It's certainly not bland, and too poetic to be a run-of-the-mill "grabber" or "shocker" opening, although it does have shock value. The unusual use of the gerund screaming signals that this writer is a poet who is willing to try things to achieve his effects. It establishes the subject-matter of the book: the development of the German V2 rockets in World War Two, as well as the important theme that these weapons, which live on in the form of the giant nuclear arsenals of today, are aimed at us all right now. Thomas Pynchon has opened his novel by launching a ballistic missile right at us. At six words, his opening sentence is 50% longer than Brown's, but two of those words are a and the--function-words that simply hold the rest of the sentence grammatically together. Four words do the main duty: screaming comes across sky (the way a Russian might say it).

You might say it's no fair to compare Dan Brown to Thomas Pynchon, and sure, it isn't. But a sentence can do a lot of duty for your story, or not, whether you're writing a smaller novel (and arguably Brown's novel is hunting even bigger thematic game, in a sense, than Pynchon's) or a major work.

Of course, to do a proper assessment of the first sentence we need to look at its context: what comes after it. But that will have to wait until I get my hands on a copy of the book again!

buyer's remorse

No writing on this rainy day. My mind was on...other things.

This evening, after the dishes, and while Kimmie and Robin were out at dinner with Ev, I poured myself a scotch and sat down for my second reading session of Kim Stanley Robinson's Forty Signs of Rain, his science-fiction opus about global warming. I've tunneled to page 52. My thoughts?

I remember now my beef with Red Mars: Robinson amasses detail that has no story purpose. Indeed, where is the story, 52 pages in?

Admittedly, the opening sentence of chapter 1 was unprepossessing:

Weekdays always begin the same.

But when I read the rest of paragraph 1 (having skipped over the 1-page italicized prologue) in the bookstore, I felt pretty good. Here it is:

The alarm goes off and you are startled out of dreams that you immediately forget. Predawn light in a dim room. Stagger into a hot shower and try to wake up all the way. Feel the scalding hot water on the back of your neck, ah, the best part of the day, already passing with the inexorable clock. Fragment of a dream, you were deep in some problem set now escaping you, just as you tried to escape it in the dream. Duck down the halls of memory--gone. Dreams don't want to be remembered.

Prosaic, yes, but I had a sense of the start to someone's day, the feeling of a fairly honest look at the internal world of a character (turns out to be Anna Quibler, NSF administrator). The rest of the chapter narrates Anna Quibler's morning routine in Washington DC as she goes to work at the National Science Foundation. Street names, subway stops, her daily experience of Starbucks. She gets to the office building where she works, learns that a storefront in its atrium is being let out to the embassy of a new island nation of Tibetan Buddhists, and hands a grant-application file related to genetic research to a colleague. There goes 10 pages.

When I described chapter 1 to Kimmie, I tried to express my dissatisfaction.

"It's just this woman going to work. There's no goal for her--no problem she's trying to solve. She should be mentally occupied with an upcoming meeting or something--worried about how to respond to a criticism from her boss. When she looks out at the streets of Washington, it should be threaded through a story problem in motion. It shouldn't just be a description of a typical day in the life."

Chapter 2, part of which I read tonight, takes us to another character going to work in California, and finding that his boss has sent out a troublesome press release, then switches to Anna Quibler's husband in DC as he goes through his day, being Mr. Mom to two young sons. The action with the infant boys is well observed, but has no story value. Get on with it! I thought as I read. Give me a plot-point here! But no, no plot-point in sight.

In short: I'm already running out of steam. I've extended this book 52 pages of credit, and as I flip ahead, it looks like another 10 pages of infant antics until the scene changes back to Anna Quibler. Will I be able to pick it up again? I don't know. But I know I shouldn't have to be struggling with the decision. I shouldn't be influenced by the fact that I've plunked down $11.99 for the book and want to get value out of it.

New Brighton Park and Botswana

Morning notes: From Eden to Exile, after another hot night with the fan blowing weakly across the bed.

Checked in at a blog I'm enjoying: Agent 007 on Publishing, an anonymous blog by a New York literary agent who was once also an editor. She (learned today that it is a she--comparing college dating experience to author-editor and author-agent relationships) is generous with her knowledge of the publishing industry, offering good tips and information otherwise hard to find. I'm drawn to this type of knowledge right now, even though it is seemingly premature for me with my project at the stage it is. I'll follow my passion.

It's B.C. Day, so Kimmie had the day off. She proposed that we have a picnic; I agreed. She packed us up a delightful lunch (egg-salad sandwiches, cut peppers, lemonade) in the genuine wicker picnic basket that Warren gave us as a wedding present a short 16 years ago. We drove over to New Brighton Park in Vancouver and hauled our goods to a spot on the lawn. I made an entry in my prose sketchbook:

MON 1 AUG 2005 1:25 pm NEW BRIGHTON PARK B.C. DAY

Touch: Wind blowing from behind—the west. Fresh, gusting breeze, cool along the back of my left shoulder and arm. Cool brushing the back of my right elbow, and curling around my head to caress my brow beneath the brim of my cap. Bare feet pressing: right sole pressing the top of my left foot. Warmth pressed to my head by the cap. Heat of sunlight cooking my bare right shoulder. Pressure of being seated on this blanket, downhill pull of the grass slope we're on.

Taste: Residual thick saltiness of Miss Vickie's Original Recipe potato chips.

Smell: The baked smell of my own skin. A damp vegetableness of the grass.

Sound: The roar of breeze across my ears. The rustle of the leaves of the lone little maple-tree nearby: like plastic bags fluttering. A persistent mechanical roar in the distance: a windy sound of the traffic rolling off the Second Narrows Bridge. Crows caw strenuously in the distance. Or the mechanical sound may be the grain elevators: the rumble of conveyors, or something. Farther away: kids' voices calling in the open air.

Sight: Wide, well-cropped green lawn: a vacant grass soccer pitch next to us, and lawn spreading around it, rolling only very gently, mainly flat. Beyond: the massive upright cylinders of the Cascadia Terminal grain towers. Pale gray, with a long conveyor angled up to the long row of housings atop girder-work gantries. A low squat ship tied up below: cream-colored cranes over a black hull. Behind it: the asymmetrical bend of the Second Narrows Bridge, with tiny cars rolling up and down it like bubbles along a transparent tube. The trees of Vancouver Heights rise thick and green over the hard line of the grain elevator, with spindly electrical towers linked like a chain-gang along the crest. An indefinite stripe of white cloud behind them, and above: blue sky tinged with white, a wash of blue lightened with white. There are yellow flowers and trembling yellow grass by the water, which itself is dark blue-green, moving like a river, pushed by wind and tide up the inlet. A pink kite dodges in the blue.

Kimmie read a chapter of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince; I read chapter 3 of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, Lessons About Boys and Goats. Good stuff; I'm enjoying it.

When I first picked up the book yesterday, a modest-sized mass-market paperback at London Drugs, standing out by its title and "feel" from all the romances and thrillers that pack the few shelves there, I was drawn to it. I had first seen the book on Mara's coffee table about 3 years ago. It looked intriguing then, but I didn't have a chance to peruse it. Yesterday I decided to give it a chance with my first-sentence test. (It had already made a favorable impression by opening plainly with chapter 1--no prologue, no epigraph.) Chapter 1: The Daddy. Sentence 1:

Mma Ramotswe had a detective agency in Africa, at the foot of Kgale Hill.

Not your usual opener for a mass-market paperback at London Drugs--so good. I kind of liked the faint echo of Karen Blixen, "I had a farm in Africa". Sentence 1 is a winner. On with the rest of the paragraph:

These were its assets: a tiny white van, two desks, two chairs, a telephone, and an old typewriter. Then there was a teapot, in which Mma Ramotswe--the only lady private detective in Botswana--brewed redbush tea. And three mugs--one for herself, one for her secretary, and one for the client. What else does a detective agency really need? Detective agencies rely on human intuition and intelligence, both of which Mma Ramotswe had in abundance. No inventory would ever include those, of course.

So far, so good. The businesslike part of me enjoyed beginning with an inventory of the "assets" of the business. Smith's style is plain and direct; already I get the feeling that it will be well-suited to his subject and his heroine. In a short space he has suggested much about Mma Ramotswe and her world--more than what he has said directly. (I talked in an earlier post about how James Joyce evoked a character so strongly by describing his room.) The narrator is establishing himself as very sympathetic with his heroine, indeed semi-merged with her. We feel that the question what else does a detective agency really need? is Mma Ramotswe's, rather than the narrator's. But I feel it's the narrator's assessment when he says that Mma Ramotswe had intuition and intelligence in abundance. We feel that the narrator likes his heroine's way of thinking, and agrees with it. There is a loving hand at work.

I read a few more paragraphs in the store, but I was already willing to give it a punt. I bought the book (marked price, $10.99 Canadian; store price, $8.79: a 20% discount, for some reason). At 3 chapters in, I've learned Mma Ramotswe's life story and she's solved one small mystery. The main story is not yet in sight, but I'm comfortable and enjoying her presence. Onward!

57 channels...

Kimmie and I had our coffee (I did morning notes: A History of Private Life), then headed off to New Westminster for breakfast at the IHOP. (Kimmie invited Robin, but Robin wanted to sleep on.) We ate big, enjoyable omelettes in the busy diner. It felt like traveling: a small-town feel, as though we were on a road trip outside the city.

We parked by Moody Park and waited in the car while rain fell thinly. Then we went strolling under the inky canopy of cloud that covered the district, while blue sky and sun shone to the west. Hydrangeas are in bloom, and roses, and phlox and dahlia. Massive oak-trees and maples grow by the dilapidated 80- and 90-year-old houses. The streets slope steeply down to the elevated SkyTrain tracks and the Scott Paper plant, while traffic rushes by the curve of highway there. Plastic toys lay in the little yards amid the noise. We climbed back up to Moody Park and watched workers'-league softball: young, blue-collar men and women in motley clothes, smoking cigarettes while their tiny children ran on the grass. The outfielders shouted continual encouragement and praise to their teammates. They played well.

Next we drove to Park Royal so Kimmie could shop for fabric to make a new summer dress she's excited about. I went to Coles Books. I perused the History section--the best shelves in this store, in my opinion, but there was nothing there I wanted. I headed to the fiction section, which is wrapped around the three walls of the store. First: science fiction--maybe something there. I was a little interested in A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but thought I'd be better off borrowing it from the library.

On to the main section. I worked my way alphabetically backward, pulling out the odd title to give it the first-sentence test, first-paragraph test. Then I'd put them back. Long stretches of Danielle Steel, Belva Plain, Larry McMurtry--the usual suspects. I sampled a few of the green-and-pink-covered "chick lit" titles, to see what all the fuss is about. Sentence fragments. Straining to be amusing. Is there any writer here, I thought, who does not regard life as a trivial waste of time?

Backward through the infernal machine I crept, subvocally humming Bruce Springsteen's "Fifty-Seven Channels and Nothin' On". Here I am, a book-lover with money in my wallet, looking to buy--I spend thousands a year on books, but now mostly used, since I can't find any new publications I want. I'm stymied right here in the store: chagrined. Curses! Foiled again.

Hm. A bunch of books by Dan Brown. Isn't he supposed to be something special? I picked up one, something to do with the ultimate code. But the opener was stale, cardboard: I think some guy leaning down lovingly over a woman, proposing to her. Or maybe it was a declaration of love. Either way, what would usually be a peak moment in most people's lives is dispensed with in paragraph 1 as a kind of throwaway. The writer may have started with a bullet-point in his outline that said, "character happy and in love", and just penned something that suggested happiness and being in love. Back to the shelf it went.

Everywhere, a blight of prologues. It's become canonical: your novel must have one. I've talked about this before. The prologue shows you the crime, or life before the story starts, then comes chapter 1, often a gush of sentence fragments frantically trying to grab the attention of the reader. Maybe if only 1 or 2 writers did it, it would be OK. But the herd mentality has taken over. Writing should not be a herd activity.

I reached the beginning of the alphabet. Star "by" Pamela Anderson. Then the erotica on the top shelf, before the As. I'd struck out.

I left the store, bookless and depressed.

the writer reads

Hadrian's Wall is due back at the library today. I made it to page 137, but am not interested enough to go further. I plan to return it.

I took it out 3 weeks ago because it was recommended by Andy Brozyna, the ancient-warfare buff who runs the website RedRampant.com, where I go for some of my military information. Of the Roman-historical novels he's read, he feels this one by William Dietrich is the most accurate and well-researched with regard to its military details. Readers at Amazon.com gave it only 3 out of 5 stars, but I was impressed enough with Mr. Brozyna's recommendation to check it out for myself. I might learn something.

Dietrich, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of both fiction and nonfiction, is a good writer, but I suspect he's a better nonfiction writer than he is a novelist.

I dislike most fiction, and to save time I assess a novel quickly based first on its overall idea, then by how it opens. Hadrian's Wall is a nicely produced book published by HarperCollins; it's a full-on A-level product with nice paper, binding, artwork (cool cover painting of the vacant, blackened wall burning on a wintry day), and design. The idea of a kind of love-triangle set on Hadrian's Wall seemed like a decent one, a bit unusual, and written by a man so possibly offering a fresh perspective.

Next: the writing itself. The novel, set in the 4th century AD, begins with a prologue in AD 122. As a rule, I don't like prologues. Most often they are merely gimmicks to try to grab the reader's attention, which is presumed to be deficient and short-lived. The typical prologue has a psychopathic stalker following an unsuspecting young girl and then brutally raping/killing/abducting her. Chapter 1 then opens with good guy cop, hassled by his day, who comes to learn about the crime. The implication is that chapter 1 is too boring to launch the story, and the reader needs a shot in the arm in the form of jolting violence to get him interested. I believe the cure should be looked for not in a lurid prologue, but in a better-written chapter 1.

Having said this, I've opened my own novel with a prologue. I didn't want to, but I felt that a certain amount of background information is indispensable to make sense of the story that follows, and this information would be impossible to provide in chapter 1. I've written a 2-page expository prologue briefly describing the history of the monarchy in Israel from its beginning in 1025 BC to its supposed end just after the return from Exile in 539 BC. It does end with a tease:

But the seed of David lived on, in hiding, awaiting the opportunity to restore the King of the Jews to his rightful throne.

To me this is an acceptable prologue, because:

1. it is short and expository

2. it provides information necessary to understand what follows

3. it gives some sense of why the story is being told

Dietrich's prologue runs 8 pages in the finished book. It's a dramatic prologue, playing out the scene of the emperor Hadrian visiting the northern frontier of Britain and shocking his subordinates by ordering the building of a mighty wall to hold out the savages of Caledonia. We learn things about Rome, about its empire, how it's defended, and so on. But in terms of the story that follows, the prologue merely establishes that a big wall was built in northern Britain to keep out barbarians. Although presented in dramatic form, with characters interacting, its purpose is expository--providing information to the reader. I believe that most readers already know what and where Hadrian's Wall is. Those who don't could be informed in a sentence or two in chapter 1 without slowing down more knowledgeable readers.

In short, I think the prologue is redundant.

Next: the opening sentences. The prologue opens:

The northern wind blew across the ridge with a howl like an army of barbarians.

The metaphor pleased the emperor, who considered himself a scholar as well as a soldier.

This already bothered me. Technically, what the emperor has invented is a simile, not a metaphor. I wasn't sure whether Dietrich was making fun of Hadrian for "considering himself" a scholar when in fact he wasn't one (and yet I think Hadrian was no doubt a scholar--a genius whose reign is considered to be second only to that of Augustus in greatness and achievement), or whether Dietrich himself doesn't know the difference. (As a teenager I saw a talk on TV by Leonard Bernstein on the difference between metaphor and simile as an introduction to a performance of Beethoven's 5th Symphony, and it's always stuck with me.) With the intensive literary education that all upper-crust Romans got, it seems very unlikely that Hadrian would not know his basic figures of speech. Which would mean that if Dietrich were making fun of Hadrian, then he doesn't know Hadrian very well. Either way, it makes the opening problematic--at least for me.

If I were simply perusing the book in the library, without a recommendation, I would have put it back on the shelf at that point. But since I was reading it mainly for insight into Roman militaria, I read on.

My impression improved. Dietrich is very good at description, in some places more than others, and good at characterization. His depiction of the tribune Galba I thought was especially good and believable. Galba fills the role of love-interest for the beautiful Roman heroine, but with much more dimension and plausibility than the run-of-the-mill beefcake in romance novels. Other characterizations are also, over all, good.

But here I am at page 137, not having picked up the book for over a week. I know I never will. For me, there's not an urgent sense of purpose to the story. It's not clear why Dietrich found it important enough to tell. It's not even clear who the main character is--Valeria, the young Roman dish? Galba, the tough but frustrated soldier? At page 137 out of 347, I don't know. And I still haven't been shown too much military insight as yet.

Back to the shelves it goes.

I finished chapter 14 at 23 pages, and started making notes toward chapter 15.