I have no objection to in media res if it's done skilfully, but I believe it may possibly be harder to do skilfully than an explanatory beginning - as long as that explanatory one isn't garrulous, which is the most common fault in one - but, more importantly, that in media res is not the all-weather solution to expository lumpiness, and that still less is it the required way to draw readers in.
Tolstoy? richardthe23rd mentioned Tolstoy, but I didn't. I haven't read Tolstoy, so I'll make no comment on his storytelling skills.
I emphatically disagree about Pullman. First and least importantly, though Pullman's opening leaves many essential matters undescribed (what a daemon is, for instance), it's much less vague about where you are and who is there than many such openings; it's not purely cinematic writing. More importantly, I dispute that the "Lyra hides and overhears" technique is at all necessary to produce the desirable effects you describe, in leaving the reader to figure out what is like our world and what is not. (Leaving totally aside the fact that, when the reader does figure it out, it reveals a world that has all the detailed scene-painting of our world, but is otherwise a crude cardboard cutout, a most disagreeable combination.) But most importantly, the real problem lies in the expository lumpiness of the conversation that Lyra overhears. It leaves the indelible impression that the manner of the conversation (the way in which the speakers talk of their subject) and its presence at that particular place and time have been arranged for the sole purpose that Lyra may overhear it, an impression frequently repeated throughout the book whenever Lyra overhears something, most glaringly in the climactic confrontation between Lord Asriel and Mrs Coulter, which reaches the absurd. The impression is further reinforced by the fact that it's Lyra's discovery of things that everybody else already knows which drive not just her actions, but the entirety of the plot. Everything shifts into a different gear, for instance, after Lyra learns that Lord Asriel is her father, even though all that's changed is that now Lyra knows it.
no subject
Tolstoy?
I emphatically disagree about Pullman. First and least importantly, though Pullman's opening leaves many essential matters undescribed (what a daemon is, for instance), it's much less vague about where you are and who is there than many such openings; it's not purely cinematic writing. More importantly, I dispute that the "Lyra hides and overhears" technique is at all necessary to produce the desirable effects you describe, in leaving the reader to figure out what is like our world and what is not. (Leaving totally aside the fact that, when the reader does figure it out, it reveals a world that has all the detailed scene-painting of our world, but is otherwise a crude cardboard cutout, a most disagreeable combination.) But most importantly, the real problem lies in the expository lumpiness of the conversation that Lyra overhears. It leaves the indelible impression that the manner of the conversation (the way in which the speakers talk of their subject) and its presence at that particular place and time have been arranged for the sole purpose that Lyra may overhear it, an impression frequently repeated throughout the book whenever Lyra overhears something, most glaringly in the climactic confrontation between Lord Asriel and Mrs Coulter, which reaches the absurd. The impression is further reinforced by the fact that it's Lyra's discovery of things that everybody else already knows which drive not just her actions, but the entirety of the plot. Everything shifts into a different gear, for instance, after Lyra learns that Lord Asriel is her father, even though all that's changed is that now Lyra knows it.