Famous Opening Lines in Literature

By Catherine Evans

Authors need to grab their readers in the first few pages of their book, or they risk losing that reader forever. Gifted authors can do it with their opening sentence. George Orwell’s 1984 ingeniously imparts worlds of unspoken information, beginning with a clever line which instantly roots the novel in an alternative reality: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” Tolstoy’s opener in Anna Karenina impels the reader to immediately reflect on their own experience: ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’

L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between has one of the most famous openers of all time: ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.’ There’s a nostalgia, a wistfulness, a longing, a recognition that what is past is lost and gone, and can never be recaptured. (The book also features one of the most beautifully written erotic scenes I’ve ever read, but that’s the subject of a different article.) Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, an atmospheric slow-burning tale of suspense, opens with ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.’ Deceptively simple, but instantly intriguing. Is Manderley a house, a village, a town? A school or mental institution? Has she dreamt of going back, or is she telling us she’s had the dream before? Winston Graham, best known for the Poldark books, immediately makes the reader complicit in the criminal career of his titular character in his novel Marnie: ‘Good night, miss,’ said the policeman as I came down the steps, and ‘good night’ I answered, wondering if he would sound as friendly if he’d known what was in this attaché case.’ Marnie is a very clever fraudster, who preys on the innocent as well as the not-so innocent, but by telling the story from her viewpoint, the reader is conflicted, and wants her to get away with her crimes.

‘Mother died today.’ So begins Albert Camus’s The Stranger, establishing an immediate intimate bond with the reader. The word ‘today’ conveys a sense of timelessness which characterises the rest of the narrative. The Color Purple by Alice Walker opens with a demand: ‘You better not never tell nobody but God.’ That voice. You know you’re about to be told something important. Your narrator may be uneducated, even illiterate, but is possessed of strength and a furious anger. ‘Call me Ishmael,’ commands the narrator of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Is his name really Ishmael? Is he concealing his real name? In the opening paragraph, with admirable economy, Ishmael gives an insight into the dark, morbid themes of the story he’s about to tell: isolation, obsession, depression, madness and death.

‘Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small, unregarded yellow sun’ begins Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Thus, the reader is required to recalibrate their entire world view, and is invited to enlarge their perspective to the infinities of the universe. Another of Adams’s books, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency begins with: ‘This time there would be no witnesses.’ Ingenious.

A clever device some authors use is to open in medias res, in the middle of the action. ‘The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we understood the gravity of our situation.’ So begins Donna Tartt’s brilliant novel The Secret History. Who is Bunny? Was Bunny murdered? Will the snow melt uncover the body? Who is we? We’re put immediately into the head of someone potentially complicit in Bunny’s murder. You’re made of stone if that doesn’t grip you. Franz Kafka opens The Trial with ‘Someone must have slandered Joseph K, for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.’ Poor Joseph K. Not only has he been arrested without cause, but he is a man with invisible enemies, the deadliest kind. Metamorphosis begins with: ‘One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.’ There’s no explanation for why Gregor has turned into a large bug. The book is concerned with how he deals with his predicament. (Spoiler alert: not very well.)

My personal favourite? ‘All this happened, more or less.’ the seemingly banal opening lines of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, a novelised memoir of his experiences of WWII. The book is absurd, funny and horrific in equal measure. Perhaps it’s my favourite because of the author’s acute observations of the ridiculousness of human behaviour, including his own. Every line is steeped in his massive generosity of spirit.

Reading makes demands of us that passive screenwatching or scrolling does not, requiring concentration and the harnessing of imagination, (although not batteries or a mains supply) so the least an author can do is make the journey entertaining, starting right from the beginning with that first opening line. The title of a book needs careful thought too … (That’s quite enough. Ed.)