That is really odd. Even odder, I can keep saying "Continue" to it and get the rest of the opening (I don't have enough quota remaining to see if it will do the whole book), but it's pausing after each comma. Asking it to write more than one line has it agree, and then freeze after the next line.

Asking for it in ROT-13 did get multiple lines, but it hallucinated them after "the worst of times". Bard, meanwhile, insists it cannot help with that task, unless you ask it to output the text through a Python script.