How much can you pack into an opening paragraph?
They were listening to music when the telephone rang. It was a summer's evening, nine o'clock. They had finished supper and Christine was listening with intensity, sitting with her feet tucked under her in the armchair; she recognised the music although she didn't know what it was. Alex had chosen it, he hadn't consulted her and now she stubbornly wouldn't ask--he took too much pleasure in knowing what she didn't know. He lay on the sofa in the bay window with a book open in his hand, not reading it, the book dropped across his chest; he was watching the sky outside. Their flat was on the first floor and the sitting-room window looked out over a wide street lined with plane trees. A gang of parakeets zipped across from the park, and the purple-brown darkness of the copper beech next door fumed against the turquoise sky, swallowing the last light. A blackbird silhouetted with open beak on a branch must be singing, but the recorded music overrode it.
That's from Tessa Hadley's new novel, out today. A few thoughts:
-As in "The Past," Hadley plants little bombs without your cognition. For example, the first sentence makes you wonder, "Who are they?"
-A story begins when a stranger comes to town, and we get that in the first sentence, as well. The ringing of the phone disrupts the scene. Something celestial--music--is supplanted by something grating, a ringing phone.
-Hilary Mantel says that, to get herself in the writing mood, she imagines her protagonist entering a room and sitting in a chair. I see that kind of detail here, as well: The two adults are reasonably at ease, in informal positions. Alex's inability to let go of his book complements his "keeper of knowledge" aura.
-Like Alice Munro, Hadley enjoys the power struggle between the sexes. Chrisine is cutting off her own nose to spite her face; there's maybe a solution to Alex's smugness problem. Christine maybe doesn't need to live without the knowledge of what she is listening to. (But don't you immediately "relate" to this small observation about a power imbalance within a relationship?)
-Hadley uses sensory detail to get us deeper into a character's state of mind. We saw that with "The Past," when Alice's discomfort was reflected in her perception of a "jostling" stream and a "tickle" of insects. Here, in "Late in the Day," we get a richer sense of Christine's intensity through her interpretation of small details around her. "A gang of parakeets zipped across from the park": "Gang" and "zipped" are lively and notable words. They aren't part of a neutral statement of fact; they help us to get further into Christine's dramatic mindset. ("Gang" and "zip" also have a jauntiness that allows us to create an image. The image is more vivid than something we'd dream up from reading: "Birds flew across the street.") "The darkness fumed, swallowing the last light": Again, Christine's perceptions give us the impression that she is not the most placid of human beings (even if she *is* tucked up in her armchair, listening to music).
-This opening paragraph gives us a sense of layers: The banal phone intrudes on the beauty of the music. But beyond that, there's another layer: The man-made music was intruding on birdsong, a song we can only imagine. Layer upon layer upon layer. The mysteries of the natural world. Writing like this may make you want to pay closer attention to life--to recognize tiny sensory moments as gifts, and not just part of a ceaseless, grinding struggle, from cradle to grave.
They were listening to music when the telephone rang. It was a summer's evening, nine o'clock. They had finished supper and Christine was listening with intensity, sitting with her feet tucked under her in the armchair; she recognised the music although she didn't know what it was. Alex had chosen it, he hadn't consulted her and now she stubbornly wouldn't ask--he took too much pleasure in knowing what she didn't know. He lay on the sofa in the bay window with a book open in his hand, not reading it, the book dropped across his chest; he was watching the sky outside. Their flat was on the first floor and the sitting-room window looked out over a wide street lined with plane trees. A gang of parakeets zipped across from the park, and the purple-brown darkness of the copper beech next door fumed against the turquoise sky, swallowing the last light. A blackbird silhouetted with open beak on a branch must be singing, but the recorded music overrode it.
That's from Tessa Hadley's new novel, out today. A few thoughts:
-As in "The Past," Hadley plants little bombs without your cognition. For example, the first sentence makes you wonder, "Who are they?"
-A story begins when a stranger comes to town, and we get that in the first sentence, as well. The ringing of the phone disrupts the scene. Something celestial--music--is supplanted by something grating, a ringing phone.
-Hilary Mantel says that, to get herself in the writing mood, she imagines her protagonist entering a room and sitting in a chair. I see that kind of detail here, as well: The two adults are reasonably at ease, in informal positions. Alex's inability to let go of his book complements his "keeper of knowledge" aura.
-Like Alice Munro, Hadley enjoys the power struggle between the sexes. Chrisine is cutting off her own nose to spite her face; there's maybe a solution to Alex's smugness problem. Christine maybe doesn't need to live without the knowledge of what she is listening to. (But don't you immediately "relate" to this small observation about a power imbalance within a relationship?)
-Hadley uses sensory detail to get us deeper into a character's state of mind. We saw that with "The Past," when Alice's discomfort was reflected in her perception of a "jostling" stream and a "tickle" of insects. Here, in "Late in the Day," we get a richer sense of Christine's intensity through her interpretation of small details around her. "A gang of parakeets zipped across from the park": "Gang" and "zipped" are lively and notable words. They aren't part of a neutral statement of fact; they help us to get further into Christine's dramatic mindset. ("Gang" and "zip" also have a jauntiness that allows us to create an image. The image is more vivid than something we'd dream up from reading: "Birds flew across the street.") "The darkness fumed, swallowing the last light": Again, Christine's perceptions give us the impression that she is not the most placid of human beings (even if she *is* tucked up in her armchair, listening to music).
-This opening paragraph gives us a sense of layers: The banal phone intrudes on the beauty of the music. But beyond that, there's another layer: The man-made music was intruding on birdsong, a song we can only imagine. Layer upon layer upon layer. The mysteries of the natural world. Writing like this may make you want to pay closer attention to life--to recognize tiny sensory moments as gifts, and not just part of a ceaseless, grinding struggle, from cradle to grave.
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