Spectator competition winners: starting over with Hemingway, Joyce, Hardy – and Dan Brown

The latest challenge was to take the last line of a well-known novel and make it the first line of a short story written in the style of the author in question. The pitfalls are many as an author approaches the finishing line. In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. Forster wrote that because of the need to round things off, ‘nearly all novels are feeble at the end’. He has a point, but some get it just right. Here’s what Robert McCrum has to say about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s anything-but-feeble conclusion to The Great Gatsby (‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’) ‘Somehow, it sums up the novel completely, in tone as much as meaning, while giving the reader a way out into the drabber, duller world of everyday reality.’ The judging process was especially painful and protracted this time around, and the roll of honour is long.