I have just seen some clickbait about JK Rowling’s first line of ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’ being voted the best ever (“Mr and Mrs Dursley of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much”). Whatever. I have, though, often mused over which was the best opening paragraph I have read in any book. So far, it is this one, from Jack London’s ‘White Fang’:
“Dark spruce forest frowned on either side of the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean toward each other, black and ominous in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness – a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.” Phew.
Any other offerings?
Surely Ruth Rendell’s 13-word opening sentence in A Judgement in Stone
Either that or Orwell’s opening sentence in 1984
Eidmann appeared before you in a five o’clock edition, his head swathed in white bands, a nun and yet a wounded pilot fallen into the rye one September day like the day when the world came to know the name of Our Lady of the Flowers.
Enid Blyton is woefully underrated.
This may not be the opening paragraph, but as an opening sentence it’s pretty good: “It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.” (“Earthly Powers”, Anthony Burgess – who may already have slipped into the rarely mentioned / no longer read category – aside from “A Clockwork Orange”).
“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.”
The first line of The Gunslinger by Stephen King: the villain, the setting, the hero, and the outline of the plot, all in one sentence. Well played, sir!
The opening line to Iain Banks “The Crow Road” is always a favourite…..
“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”
The Bookshop Band have a song with a lyric made up from famous first lines in books. I can’t claim to recognise them all (in concert they challenge the audience to name them) but I enjoy the couplet ‘It was the best of times it was the worst of t8mes / It was the day my grandmother exploded.’
A new book on the Big Bang and the first picosecond of the universe starts with
It was the best of times, it was the first of times.
from Tales From The German Sausage Factory:
“It was the best of times, it was the wurst of times”
It’s a little known fact that A Tale of Two Cities was originally serialised in 2 provincial newspapers. I believe it was the Bicester Times and the Worcester Times.
I know it’s an old joke but…
…chapeau!
Perhaps..
Common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged–the same house, the same people–and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.
I blacked out during “common sense.”
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth. The plows crossed and recrossed the rivulet marks. The last rains lifted the corn quickly and scattered weed colonies and grass along the sides of the roads so that the gray country and the dark red country began to disappear under a green cover. In the last part of May the sky grew pale and the clouds that had hung in high puffs for so long in the spring were dissipated. The sun flared down on the growing corn day after day until a line of brown spread along the edge of each green bayonet. The clouds appeared, and went away, and in a while they did not try any more.
John Steinbeck – The Grapes of Wrath
“When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago,” says Francie, “I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs. Nugent. I was hiding out by the river in a hole under a tangle of briars. It was a hide me and Joe made. Death to all dogs who enter here, we said. Except us of course.”
The Butcher Boy – Patrick McCabe.
The opening lines put you straight into the disturbed mind of Francie Brady and plant a sense of anticipatory dread that means your mind can’t fail to wonder about the horror to come. I love this book.
@Bamber
Have you ever seen the film, B?
Been a while since I read the book, but there was a great – very Irish – line in it when some old biddies are queueing up at the butchers discussing the possibly apocalyptic effects of the Cuban Missile Crisis – “sure it’ll be a bad day for this village if the world comes to an end”
I have seen it @Jaygee in a cinema in London. My abiding memory of it was having a panic attack halfway through. That was more of a reaction to the extreme work stress I was experiencing at the time.
I found it really good as an adaptation. I understand McCabe was very present during the filming even playing the town drunk. The casting of Eamon Owens was the key. He totally embodied the character as written and I remember the scene in the book where he beats two men trying to catch him seeming far fetched but he was very believable. I’ve seen a stage version where an older actor played Francie and it didn’t work for me.
Ironically, given it was my favourite book from the first time I read it, I’ve ended up working with teenage offenders, many of them very violent and with skewed world views as a result of mental health issues or substance misuse or trauma. It’s hardly a textbook but it seems far more credible now after years of this work than it did then
As a sidenote I love Neil Jordan’s adaptation of another McCabe book Breakfast on Pluto and I really didn’t enjoy the book much. It’s a gem and Cillian Murphy is wonderful in it.
@Bamber
Saw BOP – possibly the only film named after a Don Partridge song – so long ago I can barely remember it
You are right about EO in BB. Unlike CM whose career has gone from strength to strength and is brilliant in pretty much everything he’s in – EO just seemed to vanish – last thing I saw him in was the excellent Love/Hate about 10 years ago
More Dickens:
“London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.e Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth,1 and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.2 Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.3 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 foothold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this 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.”
Muriel Spark:
“Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions. The streets of the cities were lined with buildings in bad repair or in no repair at all, bomb-sites piled with stony rubble, houses like giant teeth in which decay had been drilled out, leaving only the cavity. Some bomb-ripped buildings looked like the ruins of ancient castles until, at a closer view, the wallpapers of various quite normal rooms would be visible, room above room, exposed, as on a stage, with one wall missing; sometimes a lavatory chain would dangle over nothing from a fourth- or fifth-floor ceiling; most of all the staircases survived, like a new art-form, leading up and up to an unspecified destination that made unusual demands on the mind’s eye. All the nice people were poor; at least, that was a general axiom, the best of the rich being poor in spirit.”
Raymond Chandler:
“It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.”
You saved me the trouble. This.
I’m going to have to read all those again now, aren’t I.
Library of America editions. My most-read books.
Mine too, although mostly on Kobo these days, plus chums.
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.
Graham Greene – Brighton Rock.
One of the very few UK novels that deserve to be called “noir”.
By C O’Pilot
“The rain came down like a guilty conscience, washing the city’s sins into the gutters, but it couldn’t cleanse the darkness that clung to my soul.”
The poor dear!
Rhona Barrett’s “How To Look Rich And Achieve Sexual Ecstasy” first line…
“Just one inch, Miss Rhona. Let me stick it in just one inch.” said the famous movie star.
Chris Brookmyre’s opening paragraphs are worth a few chapters on their own.
Flann O’Brien:
“Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a hollow iron bar. Divney was a strong civil man but he was lazy and idle-minded. He was personally responsible for the whole idea in the first place. It was he who told me to bring my spade. He was the one who gave the orders on the occasion and also the explanations when they were called for.”
Stop reading my mind. Just stop it. It’s not funny and it’s not clever.
As for mere opening sentences, you’ll not find many better scene-setters than: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. “
I have always liked the opening of Vernon God Little – DBC Pierre;
Act I
Shit Happened
If I might suggest: The Sign of The Four
“Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with a long sigh of satisfaction.”
“3 May. Bistritz. Left Munich at 8:35 P.M, on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late”.
No not Bradshaw’s Continental Railway Guide, 1891 but Dracula not exactly a punchy opening.
I’m quite fond of this opening. Tbh, the rest of the book is largely repetition of it.
“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive….” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”
Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. “What the hell are you yelling about?” he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. “Never mind,” I said. “It’s your turn to drive.” I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough.”
That is a great opening. I haven’t read the book, but Terry Gilliam’s film adaptation recreates that opening very well. Some of the rest of what follows is hard work, although Johnny Depp really seems to capture his mate Hunter’s character (I don’t know if the funny walk is accurate). He makes the idea of taking a suitcase full of drugs look interesting and terrifying at the same time.
From the funniest novel ever written (“The Luck of the Bodkins” by PG Wodehouse):
Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to talk French. One of the things which Gertrude Butterwick had impressed upon Monty Bodkin when he left for his holiday on the Riviera was that he must be sure to practise his French, and Gertrude’s word was law. So now, though he knew that it was going to make his nose tickle, he said:
`Er, garçon.´
`M’sieur?´
`Er, garçon, esker-vous avez un spot de l’encre et une pièce de papier – note-papier, vous savez – et une enveloppe et une plume?´
`Ben, m’sieur.´
The strain was too great. Monty relapsed into his native tongue.
`I want to write a letter´, he said. And having, like all lovers, rather a tendency to share his romance with the world, he would probably have added `to the sweetest girl on earth´, had not the waiter already bounded off like a retriever, to return a few moments later with the fixings.
`V’la, sir! Zere you are, sir´, said the waiter. He was engaged to a girl in Paris who had told him that when on the Riviera he must be sure to practise his English. `Eenk – pin – pipper – enveloppe – and a liddle bit of bloddin-pipper.´
`Oh, merci´, said Monty, well pleased at this efficiency.
`Thanks. Right ho.´
`Right ho, m’sieur´, said the waiter.
Ha! That first sentence immediately came to mind when I first saw this thread – it’s perfect.
It is indeed perfect. Even the use of “talk” rather than the more obvious “speak” is just right
Bugger, said God.
Not a book, sleeve notes. But gets you reading, don’t it?
Henry the Human Fly, a friend who was a teacher borrowed my copy and read it out at school assembly.
“I suppose you’re right cock”
“Bad Monkey” by Carl Hiassen.
On the hottest day of July, trolling in dead-calm waters near Key West, a tourist named James Mayberry reeled up a human arm. His wife flew to the bow of the boat and tossed her breakfast burritos.
“What are you waiting for?” James Mayberry barked at the mate. “Get that thing off my line!”
I’ll probably be shot down in flames here, but always liked the opening paragraph of Morrissey’s autobiography. Granted, it soon goes downhill and heads into gibberish nonsense, but still:
My childhood is streets upon streets upon streets. Streets to define you and streets to confine you. With no sign of motorway, freeway or highway. Somewhere beyond hides the treat of the countryside. For hour-less days, when rain and reins lift, permitting us to be among people who live surrounded by space and are irked by our faces.
Also the opening of Written On The Body by Jeanette Winterson is fabulous.
“Bear with me a moment. Suspend your disbelief, forget that you’re reading the first page of a book, forget you’re looking at a line of words. You’re thinking these words. These words, right now, are your thoughts and they hold you and own you and you have no control over them or where they are taking you. Look away.”
It’s Bleak House. Google it yourselves. But it would be shame to miss out the succeeding 3-4 paragraphs too.
Excellent choice.
The opening sentence of Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” does it for me. Time, place and mood wrapped up in 22 words.
“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”