Slow-Paced Beginnings in Literature.
- An Acceptable Time spent most of its time loafing around the Murrays' home. It isn't until you're most of the way through the book that the events described on the back of the cover actually get around to happening.
- Some novels by Agatha Christie are prone to this, with the murder sometimes not even taking place until the middle of the book.
- Animorphs is a minor but recurring example, as basically every book has several pages near the beginning that infodumps the series' premise—Puppeteer Parasites, dying alien gave them superpowers, they can't tell you their names lest the Yeerks find them, etc. Some fans will advise you to just skip the first few pages of every book, though occasionally one will begin In Medias Res and save the exposition for chapter two.
- Atonement by Ian McEwan, for half the novel, with the other half spent on the fallout of events from the last couple pages of the first half. And he calls himself out on it!
- The H. P. Lovecraft novella At the Mountains of Madness starts with an unusual take on this - fifty pages of description of how their scientific expedition was meant to go. How it actually went starts around page sixty. He's careful to set this description up so that it works for the book instead of against it, though.
- Brave New World: Most of the novel goes into a great deal of detail about cloning and how society works in the future. It takes a while before the main characters even get introduced, then the action begins. Of course, since setting up the dystopia is vital in order to tell a dystopian story, this is an example of Tropes Are Not Bad.
- The Casual Vacancy: Most of the story is spent establishing characters and seemingly unimportant plot points. It doesn't really pick up until the last 100 pages, with plot points slowly coming together and the last 75 pages throwing everything you had read and thought unimportant in your face.
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: The opening third of the novel is not only busy with Developing Doomed Characters and the Pinball Protagonist but also with establishing the legend of Willy Wonka and the resultant Serious Business of the Golden Ticket contest. Luckily, most of this buildup is Played for Laughs, which eases potential tedium, and once the characters are in the factory, the story becomes a briskly-paced lark.
- In-universe with The City of Dreaming Books. The protagonist was told repeatedly by his uncle to read the great novel "Ritter Hempel" (Hempel the knight) but gave up after the first fifty or so pages were all about how to clean lances. Only later he learns that everyone else had the same problem, and later in the book, there are great and funny scenes, like when the knight loses his glasses in his armor.
- Claudius the God: After having one page describing him being carried off by the army to be declared Emperor, Claudius sees an old friend of his, Herod Agrippa. The next five chapters are devoted to relating Herod's life story up to that point.
- Cloud Atlas: The opening of the novel's six stories seems to be a lot of people's least favourite in the book. It may be that the 17th-century English makes the section a little less accessible than others, and it may be that it's just a function of being the first section: the reader doesn't understand all the significances within on the first read. It might also suffer from being right next to the Robert Frobisher section, which is a fan favourite.
- The Count of Monte Cristo includes long diversions into the backstories of many characters in the first half, eventually integral to the plot but difficult to chew on. Most adaptations break them up over the course of the story.
- Crescent City: A recurring criticism from readers is that the first third of House of Earth and Blood (or even the first half according to some reviews) is extremely slow and plodding, with little progress being made regarding the central mystery for around 300 pages. The prologue itself is 90 pages long and little happens there save for a serious amount of Info Dumping regarding the setting and backstory, and establishing Danika's character...who gets murdered by the end of the prologue, thus leading to the actual main plot. And then there's a two-year time skip where Bryce apparently did nothing but sink into a drunken Heroic BSoD before the story picks up again with more murders resembling Danika's, which makes some wonder why it doesn't begin here instead. It's widely agreed things improve by the third and fourth parts, but considering House of Earth and Blood is a whopping 816 pages long, it can be a challenge for some readers to get through the first section.
- Similarly, some fans of The Dark Tower find the first book, The Gunslinger, too slow and think that the series doesn't get good until the second book, The Drawing of the Three. On the other hand, an almost equal number love The Gunslinger because it's so contemplative.
- This methodical approach works really well for The Day of the Jackal, being a novel about an elite assassin. While most thriller novels get more convoluted as they reach their climax, due to the various plot threads coming together, The Day of the Jackal instead gets more focused, all the exposition and plot threads having been dealt with earlier.
- Making Money is possibly the only Discworld book to suffer from this. We know he's going to take the position at the bank, it's on the dust-jacket, hell it was foreshadowed at the end of the last book. It is funny at first to see him resisting Vetinari, but eventually, you want to shout "Get on with it!"
- The Dogs of War is an excellent example, since it's a novel about a coup in Africa that has several chapters devoted to one character's attempt to buy out a "shell corporation". It's so detailed, it was actually used as the blueprint for at least one real coup attempt.
- The Dragon Business: The first several chapters of the second book feature two shorter adventures unrelated to the promised heroic "Scooby-Doo" Hoax, then take several more chapters to introduce the characters and setting related to that plotline. This then gets lampshaded.Cullin: I'm not finished yet. That was merely an introductory adventure, a hook to remind readers of beloved characters and provide setup for the main tale.
Prince Maurice: You mean like a prologue? Most people skip prologues.
Cullin: That is why I didn't call it a prologue. - The beginning of Frank Herbert's first Dune book is heavily weighted down with this kind of exposition in the first hundred pages.
- The Epic of Gilgamesh has a tendency of repeating entire passages verbatim over and over (for example, one person would speak to the messenger, and the messenger would then deliver the exact same speech again to his master; there's also the very long-winded title of Gilgamesh, which would be repeated every time someone uses his name). However, this is more due to a quirk of Mesopotamian oral storytelling style (and a feature of oral storytelling in general), than bad writing. The repetition aids memorization for the story-teller and the long titles of heroes make it easier to fit the name in a poetic line (as all epics were written in poetic form).
- Leon Uris's Exodus is especially bad at this. Early chapters interweave the protagonists' escape from Cyprus with detailed mini-histories of the Holocaust and World War II - at least partially justified as back story for several characters. Then the second "part" of the book stops completely for a 100-page description of modern Zionism from the 1890s through the creation of modern Israel. The novel picks up once the main story starts, but just getting there will exhaust many readers.
- Final Cut by Steven Bach has a brief prologue about why he needs to find a new movie for United Artists Studios, then spends over a hundred pages going through the entire history of United Artists before getting back to the studio's slow downfall.
- The first chapters of Frankenstein deal with the backstory of the sea captain who met the titular Doctor on his expedition to find the North Pole. If you didn't know that the novel was a Story Within a Story, you would read the opening wondering "What does this have to do with the Monster?"
- Readers may react in this way to several Frederick Forsyth stories. The author researches his subjects so thoroughly that the reader usually earns the equivalent of a Ph.D. in history, investigative journalism, corporate espionage, or prospective mining just by reading the first three chapters.
- Very common in the The Garden of Sinners novels; each part in a chapter (and there are many parts in any given chapter) usually has paragraphs interspersed through it focusing on nothing but philosophy and concepts, which even pop up in the middle of a very heated life-and-death battle. This is actually prevalent throughout Nasu's writing, not just The Garden of Sinners.
- Gone with the Wind is like the Civil War in real time, but the beginning is especially slow. It takes an awful lot of description about high society life on a rural plantation before the readers see any actual fighting. The book is explicitly a view of life in the South before and after the civil war from the civilian point of view. While the war starts a few chapters into the book, the hardships and realities of war start escalating as the book goes on. Life doesn't get much better after the war ends about halfway through the novel either.
- The Grapes of Wrath seems to take forever to just get to the Joads, wasting a whole chapter on a freaking turtle crossing a road. Then, due to pacing problems of the Joad plot, the chapters about turtles and angry car salesmen with no names end up being the best parts of the book for a lot of people.
- Great Expectations takes a while to really get moving, despite a pretty action-packed first chapter. As a result of its serial nature, the first two parts rely heavily on building suspense that pays off in the third part (where nearly every chapter has a plot twist or revelation).
- Harry Potter:
- The first book notably opens with an extended sequence showing the life of Vernon and Petunia Dursley, and overall it's about forty pages before Harry even gets to Hogwarts. Notably, the film drops the Dursley sequence, opening with Dumbledore and McGonagall delivering Harry to Privet Drive.
- The fourth book's summer portions last longer than the previous three - and it's not until the eleventh chapter that Harry and friends go back to school. It's not until the eighth chapter that the first really plot-relevant thing happens - the attack at the Quidditch World Cup.
- Many Harry Turtledove series have over a dozen viewpoint characters, and each book or major section typically starts out with a little vignette for each of them, just to remind you of the position they were in at the end of the previous book. If you're lucky, the end of these sections will feature a big change for the character, or even kill them off if you're even luckier; sometimes it just does not get better.
- The pacing in the first half of The Hike (2023) is fairly leisurely; aside from a handful of intense or creepy moments (such as Helena nearly drowning after slipping over in a river, or a lost Maggie encountering a man suspected of killing a missing woman), nothing much happens save for the four women trekking through the woods and having mundane personal conflicts (which at least helps establish their individual personalities and relationships to each other). The pace picks up considerably after they stumble on a cave used to smuggle cocaine and realise a landslide has destroyed their supplies and blocked the trail, with the second half being where most of the action and danger occurs.
- The Honor Harrington series can be like this, depending on how much you like politics. Each is at least several hundred pages long, and in one instance, a book for which the title and back cover talk all about Honor being captured, said capture doesn't happen until the last 100 or so pages of the book. In War Of Honor, the first 450 pages or so go by without a shot being fired, being spent instead on the politics leading up to the resumption of hostilities. While the political junkies are rubbing their hands in glee, the action junkies are sitting around thinking, "Someone shoot at somebody so something actually happens."
- Several reviewers have commented that the beginning of The Host (2008) is weaker than the rest of the novel.
- Robert Graves' novel I, Claudius begins with a massive history lesson that barely mentions the title character. Still, the history lesson provides enough murder, bloodlust, and political conspiracy to tide the viewer over until Claudius introduces himself properly...and then things really get interesting. It might also raise a smile at the end of the book when Claudius (a historian) says that one of the perks of becoming Emperor is that he can make everyone read his history books, and is out and out Lampshaded when Claudius mentions a few dozen pages into the book that he has written several chapters of his autobiography and hasn't quite got up to the point where he is born.
- The Iliad: The Catalogue of the Ships in the second book is so tedious that it puts some readers off altogether. For the record, it's entirely skippable as it has almost no relevance to the rest of the poem.
- Inheritance Cycle: The first book, Eragon, suffers from a bad case of this. After we're introduced to Eragon and he finds the dragon egg in the first chapter (and following the prologue where Arya teleports away the egg before being captured by Durza) the egg doesn't hatch until the fourth chapter. It then takes ten more chapters for Eragon to find out he's a dragon rider and set out on his quest with Brom, which forms the main plot. And the book has fifty-nine chapters in all and over 500 pages. note A lot of the content in the first fourteen chapters isn't all that important to the overall plot (mostly describing life in Carvahall and such) and could have been trimmed or cut to move things along more briskly; the thirteenth chapter in particular consists solely of Eragon angsting about his uncle's death and could easily have been merged with another chapter.
- This comes up a lot in the Jack Ryan series:
- In The Sum of All Fears, a 700-page book, the first 500 pages are devoted to the miserable personal life of the main character. Then the action starts.
- In Clear and Present Danger, Tom devotes nearly a chapter to the history and exploits of USCGC Panache captain Red Wegener, along with a backstory about a journalist on his ship... and Wegener goes on to play a relatively minor role in the remainder of the book. He gets about five seconds of screen time in the movie (and is played by a woman about 20 years younger than he would have been).
- Captain Tupolev's introduction in The Hunt for Red October comes to mind as well.
- Averted in Patriot Games; the main Inciting Incident begins less than a quarter into the first chapter.
- Jane Eyre is notorious for this, especially among those who read it for a school assignment. The entire first half of the novel is about Jane's awful guardians and experiences at a Boarding School of Horrors, all of which have very little bearing on the much more famous Rochester plot apart from establishing Jane's Iron Woobie status.
- Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell has this effect on a lot of people, with the first quarter of the story taken up by the fussy and passive Mr. Norrell struggling to get British aristocracy to pay attention to his magic. Mr. Strange doesn't show up until about 250 pages in, and the action doesn't pick up until a good 400 pages in.
- A good deal of the beginning of Journey to the Center of the Earth is the heroes' journey from their home in Germany to the Icelandic volcano they want to explore. Except for the acquisition of their third adventurer, nothing of importance happens in all this time and the whole first section can be skipped over without missing anything.
- Jurassic Park: It's several chapters before we even meet the main characters, and they spend most of the novel’s first half merely touring Jurassic Park. It’s several hundred pages before the dinosaurs break out, which is the entire premise of the story. Crichton states this is because he wanted to set it all up as something of a mystery in the beginning and to uncover what's going on slowly to the reader.
- Last and First Men is remembered for its daring depictions of future human species, but first it recounts the future history of our current civilization (the First Men), which is nowhere near as interesting and can be quite grating due to its highly stereotypical depiction of the individual nations' "innate character."
- In Lensman, the first sentence of Triplanetary begins "Two thousand million or so years ago" (and based on our current understanding of the history of the Solar System, it really should have been at least "Five thousand million"). It skips pretty rapidly through time after that, with short stops in Atlantis, the Roman Empire, World War II, and World War III (which, given the dating in the book, should have happened by now already) before settling down to some point in the indefinite future for the rest of the book. However, the entire first book is about the ancestors of the eventual main protagonists of the series and can be summed up as "The Arisians are Good and the Eddorians are Bad; Gharlane of Eddore in particular has been mucking up Earth's history for a Very Long Time Indeed."
- The central character of Les Misérables doesn't appear until after seventy pages spent introducing a minor character who shortly thereafter disappears from the book. This keeps happening, as when the Battle of Waterloo is described in meticulous detail before returning to the plot, which is why the book is 1200 pages long.
- The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman could be seen as this when the title character narrator digresses so much that his birth is not even covered until volume 3 of this 9 volume book, but the entire story is a humorous series of anecdotes and digressions.
- In the three-part Doorstopper The Lord of the Rings, most of the first chapter is a cosy birthday party, the second chapter is full of exposition about the main plot of the book and it only gets going the next chapter with the protagonist leaving home. Even then, it takes about half of the volume The Fellowship of the Ring for the whole Fellowship to meet, form up and begin the main Quest of the Ring. And that's not including the Introduction to get new readers up to speed on the events of its much shorter predecessor, The Hobbit.
- The Silmarillion is front-loaded with exposition, despite only being published as one book. Much of this is aimed at literally building the world of Middle-earth, but several chapters are devoted to the origins of minor figures. In this "History of the Silmarils," it's not until midway through the fifth chapternote that the eventual creator of the Silmarils is even introduced.
- A common phrase said by fans to new readers of Malazan Book of the Fallen. The first book throws the reader in the deep end without so much as a "can you swim?", with a whole host of characters and events and expects you to run with it. After the first few hundred pages, after the reader has acclimatised themselves, the experience quickly becomes less "Huh-wha?" and more "Ooohh! That's clever." Additionally, the first novel is considered the least well-written of the ten books in the series and is much slower going than the action and plot-packed second book, Deadhouse Gates. Some reasons for that are that Gardens of the Moon was written almost a decade before its follow-up, Deadhouse Gates, and was originally written as a film script before Steven Erikson decided to turn it into a book.
- The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides features detailed descriptions of the protagonist, Madeleine's English literature courses at Brown University, including a lengthy discussion of Semiotics that's either Author Appeal or thinly veiled Take That!. There are also info dumps on manic depression and religious studies used to flesh out her putative suitors, Leonard and Mitchell, along with several chapters where Mitchell travels through Europe and India. Considering that the story's a relatively simple Love Triangle, many readers find it a bit much.
- Tad Williams loves to take his time. His Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn trilogy (the fourth book was so long it had to be cut into two 800-page books for the paperbacks) took 150 pages for the action to start; everything up to that was mystery, backbiting, and intrigue. The entire first book of his Shadowmarch series is intro. The central mystery of his Otherland series is introduced in the opening chapters of the first book and barely even merits mentioning until it's wrapped up at the end of the fourth doorstopper. The only book he's written that got things going in a short amount of time also wrapped up quickly, that being his stand-alone novel Tailchaser's Song.
- Klaus Mann's Mephisto can be neatly divided into two halves: a detailed history of theater in Weimar Germany, followed by the protagonist collaborating with the Nazis to advance his career. The film adaptation notably pares down the former story to focus on the latter.
- Jeffrey Eugenides' earlier novel, Middlesex, also suffers from this at times, covering as it does a large swath of history from the Greco-Turkish War of the 1920s to Detroit during the Depression, the birth of the Black Power movement and the Detroit riots of 1967... all before the protagonist takes center stage.
- The Missus: It takes nearly a hundred pages (in a 464 page book) for Maxim and Alessia to marry and return to the UK (and for the first sex scene to occur in this erotic romance novel), with nothing of much importance or interest happening prior to this. It's only at this point - a quarter of the way through - that we really get into the main storyline of Alessia and Maxim trying to navigate their new lives together, as well as the sideplot about Maxim's brother having a fatal genetic condition that Maxim has potentially inherited too.
- The first hundred pages of The Name of the Rose go at a mindbogglingly easygoing and unhurried pace (at least compared to other murder mystery novels), with lots of obscure references and other diversions unconnected to any part of the whodunnit itself. Its author Umberto Eco wrote a Word of God postscript in part to clarify that the hard-to-get-into beginning was a deliberate choice.Eco: Those first hundred pages are like a penance or initiation, and if someone does not like them, so much the worse for him. He can stay at the foot of the mountain.
- Parasite Eve has this in the form of a very uneventful beginning, and a very slow paced middle. The book is divided into three main sections, with the first having a fairly steady pace of action but serving only to set up what's to come. The middle, which is twice as long as the other two sections, slows the action down to a crawl as it continues to set things up but becomes interspersed with a roving narration of flashbacks that provide the backstory for several of the story's central characters. Even though the conflict finally begins to show through with a short Body Horror scene near the end, it's not until shortly into the final section, with less than a third of the book to go, that all hell breaks loose and the rest of the story becomes nonstop action.
- Parodied in the novel The Princess Bride; the fictional novel that it "abridges" supposedly has a second chapter involving sixty-six pages of Florinese history. This chapter is left out completely. There's also the referenced scene where the abridging author (William Goldman) describes how a visiting princess arrives, unpacks in meticulous detail, is insulted at dinner, and then repacks everything in just as much detail as she unpacked, before leaving and never being seen again. Indeed, the whole premise of the book is that Goldman published the "good parts version" because the original was so very long and tedious.
- The Princess of Cleves, a 17th-century French novel, begins with about 40 pages describing King Henri II's court and family in confusing and mind-numbing detail. But most of this is irrelevant to the real story, a simple Love Triangle involving three of the aristocrats.
- The Robert W. Chambers story The Repairer of Reputations starts with 2-3 pages of alternate history. If you completely skip it, you won't even notice.
- The Return of the Native spends all of the first chapter describing the heath where the story takes place. The whole goddamn chapter.
- Ringworld spends quite a while showing the reader why Louis Wu wants to go traveling. Unfortunately, the reason he wants to travel is that his life is boring and hollow, something that Niven gets across a bit too effectively.
- The opening chapter of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, called "The Custom House," is composed of between 31 and 55 pages of exposition based on which version you're reading. What does this lengthy opening have to do with the book? Nothing. It tells of how a fictional Hawthorne found the fictional documents to write The Scarlet Letter. It's a thematic device that most people just skip over, as it's extremely dry. It's basically a long list of digs at Hawthorne's former co-workers, along with his complaints about being fired when his party lost the election.
Some parts, in particular the description of the General, may have had some satirical value for contemporary readers. For modern readers? Not so much. - The first third of The Skylark of Space is rather low-key. All the action occurs on Earth and is mostly the subterfuge of DuQuesne trying to steal Seaton's technology. Then they finally do get in space, and after a few jaunts to various planets, the Lensman Arms Race eventually comes in full force.
- While generally averted in George R.R. Martin's magnum opus A Song of Ice and Fire which starts with a Wham Episode of revealing the Greater-Scope Villain, has a few chapters introducing each of the principal major characters, and then has another Wham Episode with the attempted murder of one of those characters, his first novel from a couple decades prior, Dying of the Light was not so energetically started. In what is just a single novel of relatively average length, the plot proper doesn't start until about 100 or so pages into the book.
- If King's The Stand were really about a battle between good and evil, it would consist 90% of exposition and set-up. Of course, it just ends up being about a pandemic and the rebuilding After the End with a bonus dash of that good vs. evil thing. Typically of King's style, the ending features an epilogue longer than the final confrontation itself about someone making his way home by various mundane means while nothing much happens. (The book was heavily influenced by The Lord of the Rings, which has a similarly long denouement.)
- Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series is full of this (except We Didn't Mean To Go To Sea) to the point where, in a hypothetical 100-chapter book, chapters 1-98 would be very... slowly... building up suspense, chapter 99 would be the action, and chapter 100 would be tying up loose ends. (It is especially bad in the one where they are accused of untying boats but didn't, and it's really obvious who did it.) The books are very interesting, however.
- A Tale of Two Cities has some difficulty with this trope: The first 6 chapters are actually very good. Interesting, full of intrigue, likable characters. Then, after finishing Part 1, (the first 6 chapters), there is Part 2 (the next 24 chapters), which is a long sluggish read setting up for part 3 (the last 15 chapters), which is very good.
- That Hideous Strength is a drastic departure from the previous two books. Firstly, it takes place on Earth, and while there are some vaguely supernatural elements introduced early on, the first 100 pages or so are, by and large, devoted to University politics and polite people politely arguing about various intellectual pursuits that seem to be nothing but fluff if you're not paying close attention (much like the CSPAN parodies on The Onion). You'd be forgiven for thinking you got the wrong book until the second third of the book begins and things start picking up. Of course, you get a sense for where things will be going if you can manage to pay attention.
- Tyger Pool by Pauline Fisk uses this deliberately to establish the slowness and gloom suffered by a recently-bereaved family, featuring long monologues by the heroine about her deceased mother and the paralysing gloom that's affected her father. Just when you think the story's not going to go anywhere... it does.
- The premise of War and Democide Never Again is that the heroes travel into the past to prevent all the atrocities and wars of the twentieth century. No Time Travel is actually done until halfway through the book, however. Before that, there are more than one hundred and fifty pages of the main character talking about his life before getting involved in the Ancient Conspiracy to travel through time and reading flashbacks of people's lives in oppressive dictatorships.
- Jack London's White Fang took about five chapters before White Fang was even born, let alone named.
- Don De Lillo's White Noise doesn't introduce the plot device "Airborne Toxic Event" until about a hundred pages in. The first segment of the book introduces characters and sets up key themes, and it's both funny and insightful, but there isn't a ton of plot there.
- This is a common problem with 18th and 19th Century novels. Because of the wide use of a Direct Line to the Author, many novels start with long, irrelevant introductions about the literary agent and how he acquired the novel. (The fact that many if not most authors back then were paid by word count probably had something to do with it.)
- "Ayla and the Mad Scientist" in the Whateley Universe takes forever before we even find out who's going to be the antagonist for the book.
