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First novels: sometimes treasured, occasionally forgotten
First novels: sometimes treasured, occasionally forgotten

The allure of the first novel

This article is more than 11 years old
A first novel holds a special place in an author's heart – sometimes it is the only book they will write, sometimes the best. Occasionally, the writer would prefer to forget it altogether

In the summer of 1982 I bought a cheap paperback from Dick's Book Stall on Ipswich Market and read it over the next few days. I was feeling isolated, having just moved with my family from Manchester to East Anglia. In September I would be going to London to take up a university place. I read the novel and something about it seemed to reflect my feelings of uprootedness and anxiety. I found the novel as powerful as it was puzzling. At the end of the summer the book didn't quite fit into my suitcase, and as the content of it was slowly forgotten, along with the title and author's name, somehow the physical book itself also vanished from my life.

Two years later, teaching English and acting in a long-running play in Paris, I started writing my first novel, Counterparts. My mind went back to the novel I had read in 1982. Returning to London in the summer of 1985 I started looking for another copy. I tried libraries, secondhand bookshops, a book search. I tried the British Library and New English Library, because I could remember their logo on the spine, but I could find no trace anywhere of the title dredged up from my memory, The Haunted Shore, by MN Hillman. Thwarted in my search, I stopped actively looking, and as the years passed, The Haunted Shore gradually acquired talisman-like status. I remembered nothing about it, apart from a sense of mystery, inevitably deepened by the book's vanishing act, and the cover: a photograph, with a distinct green cast, of a deserted seashore.

In 2007, a broadsheet newspaper ran a feature on well-known writers' unsuccessful first novels. My eye was drawn to one cover in particular. It was the book I'd been searching for, but the title and author's name were different. The Haunted Storm by Philip N Pullman. The article said that Pullman refuses to discuss the novel and had even erased it from his entry in Who's Who.

My long search over, I went online and found that three copies of the paperback were available for around £100 each. The hardback could be had for £1,000. I bought one off eBay – the paperback, obviously. I kind of had to, really. I didn't read it, however, and in fact I soon gave it away to a book-loving friend, and bought another, which I still didn't read. In the meantime I had joined the teaching staff of the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University, where my colleague Andrew Biswell taught a literature course on first novels. Why first novels, I wondered.

Why not? First novels are special. They represent the first thing a writer wants to say about the world. They are often believed to be heavily autobiographical, but of course may not be. Mine, begun in Paris in 1984 and finished in London five years later, was about two men, apparently doubles of each other, who live in London and Paris. One is a tightrope walker who is mutilating himself in his sleep, gradually slicing his penis into halves, an eighth of an inch at a time, while the other is working as an actor in a theatre production in the French capital.

Some newspapers have a special column for reviews of first novels, which would appear to hand them special status, like a distinct genre. They are generally afforded a little leeway by critics; there's an unwritten rule that you don't slag off first novels. Some writers write only one novel – their first and last. Near-contemporaries HP Lovecraft and Rainer Maria Rilke, authors of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge respectively, were better known as a short story writer and a poet. Arguably, they were also better at writing short stories and poetry than writing novels. Another poet, who did write an outstanding novel and may well have gone on to write more, was Sylvia Plath. Oscar Moore, formerly a columnist in this newspaper, published his brilliant first novel, A Matter of Life and Sex, under the pseudonym Alec F Moran (an anagram of "roman à clef") before it was reissued under his own name. Moore died of an Aids-related illness in 1996.

Promising novel-writing careers end for other reasons, too, and can still make one feel a strange sadness. There's a certain poignancy in coming across a copy of Frederick Dunstan's Habitation One, a curious post-apocalyptic novel, in Derek's Bookstall in Preston, and reading in the author biography of Dunstan's "lifelong desire to be an author" and that in 1983, when Habitation One was published, he was "at work on his second novel". No second novel ever appeared. And there's an undeniable frustration to be felt when rereading Angelica Jacob's wonderfully cheesy 1997 novel Fermentation (chapter headings: "Brie", "Beaumont", "Roquefort" etc), that she never followed it up. Or not yet, anyway.

It wasn't long before I was teaching my own first novels course, filling the list with a mixture of modern classics and out-of-print titles my students would struggle to get hold of. I remembered being impressed by Jane Solomon's Hotel 167 when Picador published it as a paperback original in 1993; rereading it I could see its faults more clearly, but she had been only 20, younger than my students. I still felt great affection for it. I wanted to put Pullman's The Haunted Storm on the list, but couldn't expect people to pay £100 for it. I wondered about photocopying it, or buying 10 copies and loaning them out, but soon talked myself out of that madness.

I was intrigued and conflicted. Given that no publisher in their right mind would pass up the chance to rejacket and republish an early work by a hugely successful author, it's surely the case that Pullman himself refuses to allow it. It's his novel after all.

Pullman is not alone. When John Banville's backlist gets reissued, you don't see his first novel, Nightspawn, being included. Although Nightspawn "holds a dear place in [Banville's] heart", according to an interview he gave in 1994, he also described it as "crotchety, posturing, absurdly pretentious". I bought it on a recommendation from novelist Joe Stretch, who told me it was the book that made him want to become a writer. I loved it. Sure it is a bit overblown, as many first novels are, but I could see no reason for discouraging new editions. One of my favourite novels is David Pirie's first, a near-dystopian thriller sporting the wonderful title Mystery Story. It has not been in print since the original hardback published by Frederick Muller in 1980. Just over 30 years later, in 2001, a novel appeared called The Patient's Eyes: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes, obviously the first of a series. The author's name was David Pirie. The biographical note made no mention of Mystery Story and even claimed, "This is his first novel." It felt like the strangest kind of betrayal.

Clearly it would be nonsense to start thinking all first novels are bad. What if they're really good and an author never writes a better one? Australian novelist Kenneth Cook's brilliant, brutal debut, Wake in Fright, a novel of the savagery of the outback, was, arguably, never bettered by him. Then there are first novels that turn out not to be first novels. An unfamiliar author's name may be a pseudonym for an existing writer, as in the case of JM Morris's superb "novel of mystery" Fiddleback, the only novel I have ever read that comes close to the particular atmosphere of small-town paranoia generated in Pirie's Mystery Story. JM Morris was a new identity for the established horror writer Mark Morris. Many first novels will of course not be first novels at all, but may represent the fourth, fifth or 15th time an author has sat down to write a novel that will sell, but it's hugely inconvenient to go down this path, unless perhaps the actual first novel later comes to light and is published. In 1953 Alain Robbe-Grillet published his first novel, an experimental detective story called Les Gommes (The Erasers), with Les Editions de Minuit. Twenty five years later, another first novel by Robbe-Grillet turned up. Un Régicide had been written in 1949 and rejected by Gallimard. Does it read more like a first novel? It's slightly less rigorous than Les Gommes, with a dreamier feel, a little more naive, while the audacity of Les Gommes feels more like an author saying: "Alors, you didn't like my first effort? Take this, salauds!"

I started writing a new novel in 2005. I gave it the working title Either Or as it was about a man who has increasing trouble distinguishing between opposites – left and right, right and wrong, life and death. It was taking me a lot longer than usual to write, partly because of the teaching job, partly because of an editing role I took on at Salt Publishing, where in 2011 I started launching first novels by new authors, among them Alison Moore, whose novel The Lighthouse was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2012. It was very exciting to see The Lighthouse being widely reviewed, obviously because of its Man Booker longlisting – not all first novels, especially those from small publishers, are so fortunate.

When my novel was finished, it was read by my agent, who suggested we change the title to First Novel and submit it to Jonathan Cape. They made an offer for it and I was happy, but still The Haunted Storm glowered at me from the shelf, saying: "You paid all this money for me. When are you going to read me?"

So, I decided the time was right to reread Pullman's first novel. Was it terrible? Well, not terrible, but it's a tough read, stuffed with hard-to-grasp concepts around existence and non-existence, about Gnosticism and sexual joy. I wondered if the story of two brothers, who are alike and yet opposites, had influenced my own first novel, without my being conscious of it. Finally, I wondered if Pullman had ever been tempted just to buy up the remaining copies – and be done with it.

Nicholas Royle's novel First Novel is published by Jonathan Cape. To order a copy for £13.59 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to theguardian.com/bookshop

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