Lodge examines what makes a novel’s opening effective, using extracts from Jane Austen’s Emma (1815) and Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915). According to Lodge, an effective beginning draws the reader in while conveying unfamiliar information about character, setting, and tone. Since a novel’s beginning is a threshold between real and imagined worlds, it must compel or hook the reader to cross the boundary into its fictional universe.

As an example of a beginning that compels the reader to learn more about the novel’s world, Lodge discuses Austen’s classical and ironic opening: The three adjectives applied to Emma—“handsome, clever, and rich” (3)—subtly establish her as a character due for humbling, and the later prose blends the narrator’s judicious voice with Emma’s own complacent self-image. Ford’s opening takes the opposite approach, in that it gives little sure information, choosing to hook the reader through introducing modern anxieties about reliability and the gap between appearance and reality. Lodge then surveys the wide range of opening strategies available to novelists, from landscape description and mid-conversation beginnings to self-introductory narrators, philosophical reflections, frame stories, and self-referential openings, illustrating each with brief examples from canonical texts.

Lodge examines the authorial narrative voice—where the narrator addresses the reader directly—using extracts from George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859) and E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910). Eliot’s opening transforms narration into intimate direct address, presenting an omniscient narrator who incorporates encyclopedic knowledge alongside the story.

This intrusive voice fell from favor around the turn of the 20th century, Lodge argues, because it undermines realistic illusion and asserts an authority that modern readers are reluctant to grant. Contemporary fiction typically routes action through characters’ consciousness instead. When modern writers do adopt an authorial voice, Lodge notes, it tends toward ironic self-consciousness—as in the Forster passage, where protective asides about heroine Margaret Schlegel risk exposing the story’s artificiality. Lodge suggests that Forster’s playful self-deprecation earns him license for the novel’s grander thematic digressions, while Foster’s abrupt return from authorial aside to the novel’s plot at the ending of the quoted chapter generates “a fine effect of suspense” (12).

Continuing the topic of suspense, Lodge discusses its centrality to fiction. According to him, all narratives hinge on suspense since they answer the question about why something happened (causality) or “what happens next” (14). To illustrate the latter question, Lodge uses a cliffhanger from Thomas Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873). The term derives from the Latin for “to hang,” and Hardy’s scene literalizes this: While trying to retrieve his hat, Henry Knight loses his footing on a Cornish cliff and clings to the rock face while the heroine, Elfride, disappears from view.

Rather than alternating between Knight’s peril and Elfride’s rescue efforts, Hardy restricts narration to Knight’s perspective, extending suspense through philosophical meditations on geology and mortality, culminating in his encounter with a fossilized trilobite embedded in the cliff. Lodge distinguishes suspense from mystery, identifying both as the main drivers of narrative interest. He notes that suspense is especially associated with adventure and thriller fiction but that Hardy deliberately borrowed its devices from popular genres and turned them to serious literary purposes.

Lodge introduces the Russian term “skaz” to describe first-person narration that mimics spoken rather than written language, tracing its American lineage from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) to J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Twain’s innovation was pairing vernacular style with a naive adolescent narrator whose moral clarity cuts through adult pretension.

Holden Caulfield is identified as Huck’s literary descendant: He’s more affluent and educated but equally alert to hypocrisy. Lodge analyzes Holden’s style—heavy repetition of slang, hyperbole, and grammatically incomplete sentences—as creating an impression of spontaneous authenticity, thrown into relief by the polished but hollow small talk of the characters he observes. Lodge argues that the novel’s power resides not in its episodic plot but in the subtle rhythmic pleasure of Holden’s prose, which implies more than it states directly—including an unacknowledged jealousy toward a rival male figure.

Lodge traces the epistolary novel from its 18th-century peak in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747) through its near disappearance in the Modern era, using Michael Frayn’s The Trick of It (1989) as his primary contemporary example. In Frayn’s novel, a nameless British academic writes to a friend in Australia about his relationship with a celebrated woman novelist whose work he studies professionally—a relationship marked by infatuation, envy, and fear that she will fictionally exploit him.

Lodge identifies the epistolary form’s key advantages: Letters chronicle events in real time, generating urgency; the use of multiple correspondents can show an event from different points of view; and a letter’s specific addressee shapes and complicates the narrator’s discourse. Frayn exploits these, producing letters that read as one-sided dialogues. Lodge notes the irony that Frayn’s narrator complains that novelists “tell lies” within a form originally designed to make fiction look like genuine correspondence.

Lodge identifies the choice of narrative perspective as the most consequential decision a novelist makes, arguing that it fundamentally shapes readers’ emotional and moral responses. His central example is Henry James’s What Maisie Knew (1897), which presents adultery and remarriage exclusively through a child’s eyes.

Rather than imitating a child’s limited vocabulary, James renders Maisie’s perceptions in sophisticated, ironic prose that reveals far more to the reader than the girl herself grasps. Maisie’s mother Ida’s extravagant promises and glamorous but brief visits are reported faithfully through Maisie’s innocent eyes, yet James’s syntactic parallelisms and antitheses quietly expose them as hollow. Lodge notes James’s skillful use of the governess Mrs. Wix to introduce adult judgments without breaking Maisie’s viewpoint. The chapter closes with a warning against inconsistent point-of-view handling—a common weakness in inexperienced writers—and affirms that restricting narration to a single perspective can deepen reader engagement.

Revisiting the distinction between mystery (questions of causality) and suspense, Lodge uses Rudyard Kipling’s short story “Mrs. Bathurst” (1904) as a prime example of literary mystery left permanently unresolved. The story concerns Vickery, a British sailor who becomes obsessed with a brief newsreel image of a New Zealand widow, deserts the Navy, and is presumed to be one of two corpses later found burned to death. These facts emerge through layered conversation among four men meeting by chance on a South African railway siding, and Kipling withholds far more than he reveals.

Lodge argues that this approach deliberately frustrates detective-story conventions: Vickery’s false teeth —seemingly evidence of Vickery’s fate—are ultimately pocketed without disclosure. The story’s allusions to William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1609) and Christopher Marlowe align it with high tragic tradition rather than popular mystery fiction. Lodge concludes that Kipling’s true subject is the inexplicable capacity of the human heart for passion, guilt, and destruction.

Lodge argues that character names in fiction are never neutral—they always carry meaning, whether comic, symbolic, or realistic. Drawing on his own novels, he explains how he chose “Vic Wilcox” in Nice Work to suggest aggressive masculinity, “Penrose” for its associations with literature and beauty, and the spelling “Robyn” to signal androgyny and generate a plot complication. He also recounts inadvertently echoing Forster’s Henry Wilcox from Howards End and then incorporating that parallel into the novel’s intertextual design.

In How Far Can You Go?, Lodge openly debates a character’s name within the text—a frame-breaking act that foregrounds fiction’s artificiality. Lodge uses Paul Auster’s City of Glass (1985) to show how the novelist uses a name to establish the arbitrariness of naming: The detective-figure Quinn’s name is dissolved into meaningless free association, demonstrating the Postmodern argument that language cannot reliably anchor identity or meaning.

Lodge introduces stream of consciousness—a term coined by psychologist William James—to describe fiction that replicates the continuous associative flow of thought, examining Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) as his central example. He traces the technique’s origins from the novel’s longstanding introspective impulse to its full development in Woolf, James Joyce, and Dorothy Richardson.

Lodge closely analyzes the novel’s opening: The prose shifts quickly from an impersonal narrator into free indirect style—thoughts rendered in the character’s own vocabulary without authorial tags—allowing Woolf to move fluidly between Clarissa’s present perceptions and layered memories of youth, each triggered by sensory association. Lodge notes that Woolf smuggles lyrical eloquence into Clarissa’s consciousness in ways that would sound too literary as first-person memoir, and he contrasts this technique favorably with the more artificial interior monologues of The Waves (1931).

Distinguishing interior monologue or thoughts rendered as if overheard in first person, from free indirect style, Lodge analyzes three extracts from Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). The novel reimagines Homer’s The Odyssey as an ordinary Dublin day: Leopold Bloom, an advertising canvasser, is the unheroic Odysseus; his wife, Molly, is a far less faithful Penelope; and Stephen Dedalus, a stand-in for the young Joyce, is the Telemachus figure.

Leopold’s morning thoughts are practical and sentimental, rendered through fluid shifts between narrative description, free indirect style, and grammatically incomplete interior monologue. Stephen’s beach reverie is literary and associative, leaping through arcane allusion. Lodge shows how Joyce varies these modes to avoid the technique’s chief risk: narrative stagnation through trivial detail. The chapter closes with Molly’s famous unpunctuated nighttime monologue—driven by literal memory association rather than the metaphorical or metonymic patterns of the male characters—and notes that Ulysses ultimately moves beyond psychological realism into stylization and parody.