Fiction: Obviously, a reviewer should resist the temptation to judge a book by its cover. Resisting the temptation to judge a work by its first sentence can be a little harder, particularly when that sentence runs to 15 lines and 168 words.
So it is with EL Doctorow's tale of Gen Sherman's American Civil War march through Georgia and the Carolinas. And, for more than half the book, the pace, like the march and the opening sentence, is uncertain and cumbersome.
Told through the experiences of a range of characters - Sherman, freed slaves, Confederate deserters, fleeing southern belles, a field doctor and Union soldiers - the book isn't helped by a character "feeling hot tears in her throat" or sentences such as this: "He stood himself in the middle of the road with his staff and did not move" or "Every once in a while one of the horse soldiers looked down from his saddle and spit".
Again, when in one line Doctorow writes that it was "a warm day for December" and six sentences later writes about "this warm December day", you begin to question either the sharpness of his writing, the assiduousness of his editor, the author's apparent lack of faith in the intelligence of his readers or all three.
And, if Gen Sherman is in touch by telegraph with Washington, and with other Union generals, why does he read of his young son's death in an out-of-date newspaper that arrives by post? And would Dr Wrede Sartorious express himself, in 1864, as not being "fazed" by the horrors he sees in his operating theatre?
Thankfully, despite the litter of unconvincing writing, there are other, better things here, moments when Doctorow catches the pain or the terror of the war, the joy of freedom, the survival of the human spirit.
There is a poignant and beautifully written moment where two friends, one living, one dead, sit side by side on a divan: "And the two of them sat that way in the quiet of the burned air under the blackened trees, neither the dead man nor the living inclined to move."
Or the passage where Albion Simms, who has a metal bolt lodged in his brain following an explosion, tries to have a conversation but constantly forgets what he has said:
"No, I can't remember. There is no remembering. It's always now."
"Are you crying?"
"Yes. Because it's always now. What did I just say?"
"It's always now."
"Yes."
Nor is the horrendous irony of war lost on Doctorow - the photographer who is blinded; the church altar used as an operating table; the slaves who refuse freedom - and Sherman recognises it, too: "But victory was a shadowed, ambiguous thing."
He might have been describing this book, a work that gives glimpses of the mud, the blood and the good but never quite succeeds in convincing that its characters are real, a book that rarely entices the reader to cross that line between understanding and caring.
John MacKenna is a novelist, short story writer and playwright. His next book, Things You Should Know, will be published by New Island Books later this year
The March By EL Doctorow Little Brown, 367pp. £11.99