The Guardian & The Observer’s guide to the 10 greatest opening lines in novels written in the English Language pissed me off. Put succinctly we’ll keep Joyce, Austen, Bronte and Plath but as for the rest… well, we’d better get started.
This has got to be one of the very best openings to any novel. Ever.
1: Iain Banks, The Crow Road. 1993.
It was the day my grandmother exploded. I sat in the crematorium, listening to my Uncle Hamish quietly snoring in harmony to Bach’s Mass in B Minor, and I reflected that it always seemed to be death that drew me back to Gallanach.
I looked at my father, sitting two rows away in the front line of seats in the cold, echoing chapel. His broad, greying-brown head was massive above his tweed jacket ( black arm-band was his concession to the solemnity of the occasion). His ears were moving in a slow, oscillatory manner, rather in the way John Wayne’s shoulders moved when he walked; my father was grinding his teeth. Probably he was annoyed that my grandmother had chosen religious music for her funeral ceremony. I didn’t think she had done it to upset him; doubtless she had simply liked the tune, and had not anticipated the effect its non-secular nature might have on her eldest son.
Two years before Bridget Jones fell off The Edge of Reason with her modern Darcy, there was:
2: Kathy Lette, Altar Ego. 1998.
Query: Would it be a serious breach of etiquette to run out on my own wedding? That was the question I asked myself as I put a leg over the window ledge of my parent’s bathroom, grimly regarding the ten-foot drop into the putrid metallic dustbins below.
3: Graham Greene, Brighton Rock. 1938.
Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours that they meant to murder him. With his inky fingers and his bitten nails, his manner cynical and nervous, anybody could tell he didn’t belong – belong to the early summer sun, the cool Whitsun wind off the sea, the holiday crowd. They came in from Victoria every five minutes, rocked down Queen’s Road standing on the tops of the little local trams, stepped off in bewildered multitudes into fresh and glittering air: the new silver paint sparkled on the piers, the cream houses ran away into the west like a pale Victorian water-colour: a race in miniature motors, a band playing, flower garden’s in bloom below the front, an aeroplane advertising something for the health in pale vanishing clouds across the sky.
Four lines of EMF blows four chapters of Treasure Island out the water.
4: E.M. Forster, A Passage to India. 1924.
Except for the Marabar Caves - and they are twenty miles off - the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary. Edged rather than washed by the river Ganges, it trails for a couple of miles along the bank, scarcely distinguishable from the rubbish it deposits so freely. There are no bathing-steps on the river front, as the Ganges happens not to be holy here; indeed there is no river front, and bazaars shut out the wide and shifting panorama of the stream. The streets are mean, the temples ineffective, and though a few fine houses exist they are hidden away in gardens or down alleys whose filth deters all but the invited guest.
Five years before Stephenie Meyers sparkled Edward into existence, Sookie Stackhouse and True Blood, were at the tip of the fang.
5: Charlaine Harris, Dead Until Dark. 2001.
I’d been waiting for the vampire for years when he walked into the bar.
Ever since vampires came out the coffin (as they laughingly put it) four years ago, I’d hoped one would come to Bon Temps. We had all the other minorities in our little town – why not the newest, the legally recognised undead? But rural Northern Louisiana wasn’t too tempting to vampires, apparently; on the other hand, New Orleans was a real centre for them – the whole Anne Rice thing, right?
6: Charles Dickens, Bleak House. 1853.
LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.
Thank you. I feel a lot better now.
Their article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/gallery/2012/apr/29/ten-best-first-lines-fiction?newsfeed=true#/?picture=389274023&index=0
1. J.Joyce - Ulysses. 1922.
2. J.Austen - Pride & Pred. 1813.
3. C.Bronte - Jane Eyre. 1847.
4. M.Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1884.
5. P.G.Wodehouse - The Luck of the Bodkins. 1935.
6. A.Burgess - Earthly Powers. 1980.
7. D.Smith - I Capture the Castle. 1948.
8. S.Plath - The Bell Jar. 1963.
9. D. Tartt - The Secret History. 1992.
10. R.L.Stevenson - Treasure Island. 1883.
