Doing it that way was a gamble; I had a lot to tell you and I wanted your interest right away. I wanted to guarantee some thrills and spills, and show the flashy red silk lining of my writer’s long black coat. At the same time, I didn’t want to scare anyone off…

The other obvious possible starting place was what in the end became chapter 2 – Gonzo and our narrator in childhood. In a sense, that’s the respectable place to start, the grown-up place. But it’s also a long haul from there to the main action, and I really wasn’t sure anyone would want to know. My heart sinks a bit when I open a book and find that, before I meet Che Guavara, gun-totin’ hero of the proletariat, I have to spend a decade and more of book-time getting to know him as a kid and a medical student. In other words, I could have gone that road – but I didn’t want to scare anyone off…

When I gave the book to the first few people to see it, they split down the middle (figuratively speaking). Some of them – the younger ones – loved chapter 1. The others hated it and couldn’t understand why it was there. Fine, I thought. It’s a basic demographic split. I can deal with that.

Nope.

As the book has gone out into the world and more and more people have seen it, the split has become more intricate. Some people hate that first section. For others, it makes the thing work, draws them in and then provides them with a pleasurable frustration which powers them into the story.

Tom Abba suggests that the structure of the book is televisual, and he may be right. I never did much TV writing, but I can see the argument – and it seems incredibly unlikely that I could come through nine years as a script writer and not have a style which draws on visual media. I mean, that would suggest I was never really taking part in the script game at all, and I really, really was. I gave it everything I had.

The first pages of a book – even the first lines – are tremendously important. Some of the most powerful writing I can think of tells you everything in those early sentences. How about this one:

Jackie Brown at twenty six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns.

That’s the first line of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, and it is a zinger. Damn, but that’s got some class, and some real narrative oomph.

What I wanted my first pages to tell you was: this is going to be a wild ride! Fasten your seat belt, put on your life jacket, and put your earplugs in. Stick with me, I’m going to show you some great stuff.

So starting with Gonzo Lubitsch as a five year old… that just seemed like an awfully big ask. I think that opening says: this here is a serious generational novel, and it’s going to take you a while, but you’ll be a better person for reading it.

The other thing about starting where I did is this: there’s a great deal of weird in The Gone-Away World. It’s got some extremely odd twists and turns, and for many people it’s going to take them further into the freaky than they usually allow their reading matter to go. What I wanted was to throw them into the great, smoky sauna of strangeness, and then whisk them right out again into the reassuring plunge-pool of icy normality. Then they could go swim in the lagoon of unusual before being thrust once more into the fiery bizarreness of whatever the hell Swedish bathhouse comparison would make this appalling extended metaphor work for you.

The point is, chapter 1 is also an inoculation. It tells you there’s strange stuff coming. Then chapter 2 tells you this is really a safe, familiar kind of story, and then you get the transition from one to the other at a gradual pace. By the time the world goes mad, you don’t feel threatened by it, you just enjoy the story.

That’s the theory, anyway.

But still and all, it does seem that chapters 1 & 2 divide people sharply. Which I think is probably a good thing.