Atlantic magazine asked some of America's greatest writers last week for their favourite first lines from literature. We decided to ask the same of this year's Man Booker prize longlist … with some surprising results
Famous first words: some of the books which the Man Booker listed authors find gripping right from their opening sentences.
First lines for novelists are a bit like penalty kicks for goalies, a heart-stopping opportunity for a great performance, writes Robert McCrum. It's your show, and there's no going back. More than that, a good first line, like Stravinsky's reedy bassoon in The Rite of Spring, or the clarinet glissando that launches Rhapsody in Blue, becomes an advertisement for what's to follow. In storytelling, a first line plays many parts. It can seduce, or intrigue; advertise, baffle, or inspire. Whatever else it does, it must button-hole the gentle reader but – and this is the tricky part – it must not try too hard. Advice to would-be novelists: avoid that "Look, Mum, I'm dancing" first line. Readers always know when there's too much spin on the ball.
Traditional lists of first lines tend to rehearse the famous openings of Austen, Dickens and Melville ("It is a truth universally acknowledged…"; "It was the best of times…"; "Call me Ishmael"). By contrast, our catalogue is new. These Booker prize longlist writers have rather dodged Huckleberry Finn, Jane Eyre and To the Lighthouse. Anyway, who needs the classics when there's so much contemporary variety on offer? Or forgotten gems? For instance, Dodie Smith's opening to I Capture The Castle, "I write this sitting in the kitchen sink." As Oscar Wilde put it – but not in a first line – "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." It's the writer's job to be quotable.
(THE LUMINARIES)
"They have said that we owe allegiance to Safety, that he is our Red Cross who will provide us with ointment and bandages for our wounds and remove the foreign ideas the glass beads of fantasy the bent hairpins of unreason embedded in our minds."
Faces in the Water (Janet Frame)
Never has an opening of a book arrested me so absolutely than when I first encountered Janet Frame's extraordinary Faces in the Water. Frame's authority is a kind of audacity, but a sly audacity, strangely wistful, strangely desperate. I love the archness of "they have said" and the elevation of Safety as "he" – the first impression is of stylistic confidence and purpose – but the oddness of "glass beads of fantasy" and "bent hairpins of unreason" is unsettling, both to the reader and the sense of the sentence; the air of confidence doesn't ebb exactly, but it alters. I love, too, the way the rest of the sentence unfolds breathlessly, unencumbered by punctuation.
(THE MARRYING OF CHANI KAUFMAN)
"His children are falling from the sky."
Bring Up The Bodies (Hilary Mantel)
The image is so starkly powerful and enigmatic. Who can resist it? I had to stop and reread it when I saw it the first time. The line is bewildering and mysterious and, on the surface, a fitting one for the swirling, shifting politics of Thomas Cromwell and the court of Henry VIII, where nobody can be trusted and nothing is what it seems. Is it a dream? Whose children are they? How can children fall from the sky? The book is the sequel to Mantel's Man Booker winning Wolf Hall. You might assume it would be a tall order to follow, but, in one sentence, she manages to catapults the reader straight back to the world she has so brilliantly drawn. Then there's another layer to the line. Reading on, you realise "his children" are actually birds of prey swooping for the kill, or returning to their master (Cromwell), their breasts blood-stained. Cromwell has named these birds after his dead daughters (lost to the plague) and immediately Mantel creates sympathy in the reader by humanising her anti-hero. We learn him from the inside out.
Read them all
Traditional lists of first lines tend to rehearse the famous openings of Austen, Dickens and Melville ("It is a truth universally acknowledged…"; "It was the best of times…"; "Call me Ishmael"). By contrast, our catalogue is new. These Booker prize longlist writers have rather dodged Huckleberry Finn, Jane Eyre and To the Lighthouse. Anyway, who needs the classics when there's so much contemporary variety on offer? Or forgotten gems? For instance, Dodie Smith's opening to I Capture The Castle, "I write this sitting in the kitchen sink." As Oscar Wilde put it – but not in a first line – "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." It's the writer's job to be quotable.
ELEANOR CATTON
(THE LUMINARIES)
"They have said that we owe allegiance to Safety, that he is our Red Cross who will provide us with ointment and bandages for our wounds and remove the foreign ideas the glass beads of fantasy the bent hairpins of unreason embedded in our minds."
Faces in the Water (Janet Frame)
Never has an opening of a book arrested me so absolutely than when I first encountered Janet Frame's extraordinary Faces in the Water. Frame's authority is a kind of audacity, but a sly audacity, strangely wistful, strangely desperate. I love the archness of "they have said" and the elevation of Safety as "he" – the first impression is of stylistic confidence and purpose – but the oddness of "glass beads of fantasy" and "bent hairpins of unreason" is unsettling, both to the reader and the sense of the sentence; the air of confidence doesn't ebb exactly, but it alters. I love, too, the way the rest of the sentence unfolds breathlessly, unencumbered by punctuation.
EVE HARRIS
(THE MARRYING OF CHANI KAUFMAN)
"His children are falling from the sky."
Bring Up The Bodies (Hilary Mantel)
The image is so starkly powerful and enigmatic. Who can resist it? I had to stop and reread it when I saw it the first time. The line is bewildering and mysterious and, on the surface, a fitting one for the swirling, shifting politics of Thomas Cromwell and the court of Henry VIII, where nobody can be trusted and nothing is what it seems. Is it a dream? Whose children are they? How can children fall from the sky? The book is the sequel to Mantel's Man Booker winning Wolf Hall. You might assume it would be a tall order to follow, but, in one sentence, she manages to catapults the reader straight back to the world she has so brilliantly drawn. Then there's another layer to the line. Reading on, you realise "his children" are actually birds of prey swooping for the kill, or returning to their master (Cromwell), their breasts blood-stained. Cromwell has named these birds after his dead daughters (lost to the plague) and immediately Mantel creates sympathy in the reader by humanising her anti-hero. We learn him from the inside out.
Read them all
