In a recent piece in the Guardian, Robert McCrum listed what he considers the ten best openings to novels. Most of the usual, and deserving, suspects were there: Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. McCrum went out on a limb, too, going further afield, opting to include Donna Tartt, P.G. Wodehouse and Sylvia Plath (the latter's scorching, tone-setting opening of The Bell Jar is, indeed, a stunner) -- but might not a longer list, going far further past expectations, been the way to go? Readers have been giving their suggestions in the comments on the piece, but these, too -- e.g. Nabokov's Lolita, Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities -- have been predictable, if deserving. Might not McCrum need to expand his own horizons as a reader? I put forth the openings of Sebastian Barry's Annie Dunne, Peter Matthiessen's At Play in the Fields of the Lord, Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley, Dickens's Bleak House and Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Love in the Time of Cholera as more than worthy to sit alongside the Austen, Bronte and Twain.

Barry: "Oh, Kelsha is a distant place, over the mountains from everywhere. You go over the mountains to get there, and eventually, through dreams."

Matthiessen: "In the jungle, during one night in each month, the moths did not come to lanterns; through the black reaches of the outer night, so it was said, they flew toward the full moon."

Llewellyn: "I am going to pack my two shirts with my other socks and my best suit in the little blue cloth my mother used to tie round her hair when she did the house, and I am going from the Valley."

Dickens: "London."

Garcia Marquez: "It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love."

These speak for themselves and are among the dozen or so finest openings to novels I've ever encountered. I'd put the Plath in there, too. Sarah Waters's Tipping the Velvet. Graham Greene's The End of the Affair. Peter Carey's Illywhacker. The first paragraph of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. The first five or six sentences of Graham Swift's Waterland.

To paraphrase (if I'm not mistaken) the poet William Stafford: the beginning of a poem should feel like stepping onto a moving train. Or into a dream.

Ditto the beginning of a novel.

I finished William Golding's Rites of Passage late last week and have to admit mild disappointment with it. I'd never read him before -- not even Lord of the Flies (I know, I know) -- but thought: a Booker Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature must bode well, right? And I've always had a keen interest in seafaring tales, so where could it have gone wrong?

The novel is the journal of Edmund Talbot, written as a gift to his godfather (that the latter might live a vicariously youthful life) and meant to be a document of the comings and goings aboard the vessel. Golding, for his part, succeeds in the voice of the novel -- it feels authentic to the literature and correspondences of the Regency period -- but in too little else. One would think that the sea would fan the flames of an author's powers of description, but there was very little prose in Rites of Passage noteworthy for either its observational precision or its striking beauties. One exception would be a passage early on in which the sailors -- on deck, in their oilskins, during a mighty gale -- "resemble nothing so much as rocks with the tide washing over them." I felt, with this passage, that I saw precisely what Golding intended me to see, that he was -- in that moment -- the captain of a narrative ship capable of inspiring envy in other writers and gratitude in careful readers. But the book almost never sees such piercing and lovely descriptions again. Still, though I'm a reader who loves language above even character and the spinning of the yarn, I've learned to recognize, over the years, that a fine novel needn't luxuriate in alliterative language or flights of metaphor to be a fine novel. In short, not every writer has the poetic sensibility of Sebastian Barry or Peter Carey or Iris Murdoch. Two of my very favorite novelists -- Rohinton Mistry and Sarah Waters -- mine their genius (and genius it is) elsewhere: in depth of character, or startling empathies, or byzantine plotting, or sensitivities to period and politics, or experiments in perspective. In their cases, the prose serves ends more foundational than itself -- the brilliance is in the bricks. And while this was nearly the case with Rites of Passage -- Golding's tweaking of perspectives (giving us, in the journal, Talbot's view of Colley and then, in the letter, Colley's view of Talbot's behavior towards Colley) deepens the pathos manyfold and makes characters of caricatures (until we're allowed his voice, Colley seems like a thin unflattering riff on Austen's Reverend Collins in Pride and Prejudice) -- the book has too much going against it (e.g. a too-awkward mishmash of horror and humor, a narrator it seems Golding wants us to like despite his giving us little or no good reason to) for it to sing as a Booker Prize-winner should.

I liked Rites of Passage well enough, but shouldn't the novel that saunters off with the most prestigious literary prize in England be liked better than well enough?

Its shortlist competition in 1980: Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers, J.L. Carr's A Month in the Country, Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day, Alice Munro's The Beggar Maid, Julia O'Faolain's No Country for Young Men, Barry Unsworth's Pascali's Island

Reading: 1st
An undeserving winner

I finished Graham Swift's Last Orders the night before last and found it as moving as any novel I think I've ever read. It certainly more thoroughly reduced to me tears than any novel since I read Ian McEwan's Atonement in 2003, and while I know a novel's plucking effect on its reader's heartstrings is no measure of its greatness, per se, its having earned those tears (when it does) is.

My wife Kelly and I recently took a brief holiday (recovering from having spent yet another Christmas in the world of retail) -- four days and three nights at a little bed & breakfast in the mountains west of Missoula -- during which I thought it would suit me best to amble from book to book. And so I finished Libba Bray's Rebel Angels, started Lee Child's Killing Floor (which I've likewise since finished) and cranked out the first 60 pages of Last Orders in one sitting. Having read and admired (with some reserve) Swift's Waterland in 2005, I was prepared for his disinclination to sensual portraiture -- the identities of his characters are rooted in their dialogue, their thoughts, their environments and their situations, not at all in hair color, whether their skin is freckled, etc. And for a reader who loves sensual description of place and person as much as I do, Swift's habit of suggesting characters in lieu of painting them -- my friend Christian, lamenting this very thing in Waterland, once commented: "When I think of Mary, I think of her hole..." because Swift gives us little but her vagina with which to imagine her -- can be problematic (I actually take similar issue with Jane Austen's prose). But something about Last Orders hooked me from the outset.

There is such warmth in the Cockney voices shot through the novel that it feels burnished, like wood polished to a glow. Unlike certain other novels written in dialect (Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God comes to mind), it never alienates. And the shuttling back and forth between perspectives in the book -- from Ray to Vince to Amy to Lenny to Ray, etc -- allows Swift to exercise tremendous patience and precision in connecting dots, in braiding these lives one to another. In the end, each character's decisions echo -- and move us -- because we've been given such a profound sense of context. Such a dense knitting together of these lives might seem a contrivance -- indeed, it does to some (including my friend Sarah, who hated the book for what she calls its phoniness) -- and leveled criticisms along those lines would be valid, I think, in part because the book is such a tangle of histories. But, again, because the novel's voices feel so broken-in and lived -- as though Swift has not written them so much as recorded them -- and because I've experienced (with the men with whom I've been friends between 16 and 28 years) something like the calibre of masculine friendship seen here and have lived (not unlike Jack Dodds) in perfect willful and shameful ignorance of a disabled relative who would, I'm sure, have liked (when I lived unbelievably in the same town) to see me and have been seen by me more than once every two years or so, it all just rings true.

Perhaps the highest compliment I can make to Last Orders is that I felt, in the end, as though I'd been, throughout the book, the fifth man in the car on the drive to Margate to spread Jack's ashes in the sea.

Its shortlist competition in 1996 (those I've read in italics): Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, Beryl Bainbridge's Every Man for Himself, Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark, Shena Mackay's The Orchard on Fire, Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance

Reading: 1st
A deserving winner