In the first sentence of his book, Jolyon Maugham – the anti-Brexit KC best known for clubbing a fox to death – achieves a mean feat. In 22 words, he conveys his trademark self-pity, self-aggrandisement and capacity for tying himself into pompous knots: ‘The life I have is hard, but I got to choose it, and the road that brought me here I did not,’ Maugham writes in Bringing Down Goliath. It certainly acts as a tantaliser. If this is only the first sentence, what other jewels are contained in the remaining 318 pages?
After we’ve picked ourselves up from the floor, it’s worth unpacking – or trying to unpack – this remarkable string of words. ‘But’ and ‘and’ seem to be in each other’s places. Swapping them around would lift some, though not all, of the line’s tortuous quality. Even so, the opening gambit still clunks like a sack of coal being emptied down a chute: the thing Maugham is trying to convey just doesn’t make sense.
Try telling that to Maugham. Yuan Yi Zhu did in his blistering review of the book for the Times on Saturday and the backlash was swift. ‘Quite the review from the (Brexit supporting, pro Climate Change, racist, transphobic, anti-abortion, supine to power) Times,’ Maugham wrote on Twitter. But while Maugham didn’t like it, Zhu was spot on when he called out the book’s ‘very first, unforgivable sentence’.
Maugham seems like a character rather than a real person
First lines are important, in today’s world of ‘Look Inside’ on Amazon, just as much as in the lost age of physical bookshop browsing. An arresting opening lifts the heart or intrigues the mind, and guarantees a sale.
Maugham has committed the classic novice writing error of overthinking, of trying to be too clever. All writers will tell you how familiar they are with the first sentence of a book, of how they can start to second-guess themselves and fiddle about with it. Keep it simple! The perfection of Anna Karenina‘s ‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’ and Nineteen Eighty-Four‘s ‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen’ comes from their restraint. They are easy to parse. Crucially, they make you want to read the second sentence.
I grew up on the less literary fare of the Doctor Who novelisations of the late Terrance Dicks, who dropped these pithy preludes effortlessly: ‘Through the ruin of a city stalked the ruin of a man’; ‘He was a dead man running’.
Over-complication is the hallmark of the bad writer. Shirley Conran’s (very enjoyable) Lace begins:
‘It was a warm October evening in 1978 with the distant skyscrapers sparkling in the dusk as Maxine glanced through the limousine window at the familiar New York skyline.’
All the right words are there, but not necessarily in the right order. This syndrome can affect even the literary greats. Penelope Fitzgerald’s marvellous At Freddie’s begins:
‘It must have been 1963, because the musical of ‘Dombey & Son’ was running at the Alexandra, and it must have been the autumn, because it was surely some time in October that a performance was seriously delayed because two of the cast had slipped and hurt themselves in B dressing-room corridor, and the reason for that was that the floor appeared to be flooded with something sticky and glutinous.’
If you didn’t already know that book is written by a giant, and from the perspective of a slightly unusual person, you’d think ‘uh-oh’.
Song lyrics are another arena where it doesn’t pay to try to be smart at the start. ‘Most of my friends were strangers when I met them’ is a striking first line. If it was coming from Neil Tennant or Ron Mael you’d think ‘ooh, funny, that’s clever.’ But in fact it’s the opening of ‘I Quit’ by Bros. See also Thin Lizzy with, ‘Tonight there’s gonna be a jailbreak, somewhere in this town’. The fishmongers? The municipal baths? I would suggest that the jail might be a good bet.
The best song openings use simple words to conjure up a mood, a whole world, in seconds. You can imagine them as the first lines of books or poems; ‘Friday night, and the lights are low’; ‘Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?’; ‘Trudging slowly over wet sand, back to the bench where your clothes were stolen’; ‘Billie-Ray was a preacher’s son, and when his daddy would visit he’d come along’.
Who do you think wrote: ‘I’m sitting, writing, under an apricot tree in Cyprus and every welcome breeze brings a small series of ‘plops’ as the ripe fruit falls, sometimes through the rosemary bush, to the ground. They taste the best, those that pick up the scent as they fall’?
This was Maugham again, last June on Twitter, sharing the secrets of his compositional process. The life he lives is a hard one indeed. The grandeur; the overwhelming bathos of those ‘plops’; the mental image of Jolyon stretching out a lazy hand and sniffing at the apricots to find a rosemary-scented one. All these combine to produce an exceptional – unaware – comic talent. As many have noted, he seems like a character rather than a real person. He has the whiff of Alan Partridge about him.
The most entertaining thing about Maugham is that he cannot learn; he knows he is always in the right, and is as thin-skinned as an anatomical skeleton. (These are, needless to say, terrible flaws in a legal advocate.) Other people, like Zhu, who don’t agree with him can’t simply be misguided, or have different priorities that he considers mistaken. No, they are self-interested agents, dark forces of power. His response to a stinking review is to loudly attack the reviewer. What a pity: Maugham has much to learn.
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