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 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

A review of Last Orders is forthcoming. My wife and I have just returned from four days at a bed and breakfast way up a mountain outside Missoula, during which I started the Swift novel and am making swift progress through it. (The case with the Better Business Bureau has gone nowhere -- indeed, it looks as if Printer's Row has fleeced me. At least it'll be a stain -- even if not Concord grapes on pearl silk -- on their record. I'm reading an American trade paperback purchased with credit from a used bookshop here in town.)

Some time has passed since the initial post heralding the launch of Booking a Room with a View with Graham Swift's Last Orders -- and I thought it best to let the few readers I have, at this point, know the reasons behind it remaining unread in all these weeks.

I'm a sucker for the perfect cover, a reader with a hang-up on aesthetics, and have long coveted the British cover of Swift's novel. Having seen the Fred Schepisi film based on the book, the foam from a pint seems to me the perfect image. I once almost bought the novel while in England and have countless times come this close to ordering it online, but all editions featuring this cover are now out-of-print and so it fell to me to order what turned out to be a first edition from a rare book dealer in Chicago -- $25 with free shipping seemed a reasonable amount for a first edition hardcover in fine condition. Except that -- according to the book dealer -- it shipped almost five weeks ago and has yet to arrive in my mailbox. I've sent three e-mails inquiring after tracking data, none of which have brought a response. The first time I called, half a week after having no luck with the e-mails, the seller picked up the phone and knew what order I was asking about before I even had the sentence spoken (imparting to me the above shipping date and promising an e-mail with tracking details) -- a sure sign he has caller ID. All three or four further phone calls I went on to make (when the tracking e-mail never arrived) going unanswered and unreturned can, in all likelihood, be attributed to the caller ID. The last message I left on the seller's machine was a diplomatic demand that my $25 be refunded -- which it still hasn't.

So the reading of Last Orders is on hiatus until an edition is in my possession. Should no refund appear on my charge card statement, I'll be contacting the Better Business Bureau in Chicago about Printer's Row Fine & Rare Books.

My wife, who is in the midst of reading each Pulitzer Prize-winning work of fiction (and has crossed the midpoint in doing so), inspired me to this similar end in taking the Booker Prize as a challenge. I've followed it for a long time now and have just as long thought it the gold standard, the height to which novels should aspire in the English-speaking world. Granted, as a Commonwealth prize, it excludes American writers (unless, as was the case with Carol Shields, those writers have dual citizenships) -- meaning the National Book Critics Circle Award (open to all works of English-language fiction, American or Commonwealth) is closer to being an objective gold standard. But we all have our preferences, and I'm a Booker Prize man.

I'll make clear up front that while I've read a number of these titles before, all will be read, for this venture, anew. Despite having read Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda seven times in the past, for instance, I'll read it an eighth time for the purpose of commenting on it here. In addition, please note that I'll do my best to keep reviews free of spoilers and ask that readers of this blog do the same in their comments (and I hope there are comments -- I'm just as anxious to hear your thoughts on the Booker Prize-winners I read as I am to offer mine).

Let it begin -- as I begin with Graham Swift's Last Orders.