Favourite Opening Lines
First lines that are an invitation to read on
This challenge was set way back in November by Marrisa W.. Simply write some favourite opening lines. I am a little late to this particular party, but as a lifelong bibliophile I couldn’t resist. So I shall begin with the book I have known and loved the longest.
“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.”
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.
I’ve had this book through various editions as it’s been worn out with repeated reading, got lost in house moves or was lent and not returned. The first-ever copy was given to me as a Christmas present when I was nine years old. Every time I read it I discover something new in it The plight and peril of the child Jane engaged the child who opened the Christmas present, Jane and Rochester’s relationship appealed to my incurably romantic adolescent self, as I got older I saw the feminist message in it.
For a Victorian clergyman’s daughter, it is an astonishing act of literary defiance as Jane expresses her discontent with her lot — “…women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer…” When she turns to Rochester, who is being a selfish bastard as per usual, and declares “we are equal,” she rejects every tenet of a society that insists- in terms of gender, social standing, income, their respective statuses as master and servant — she is his inferior. Go, Charlotte!
“I became what I am today at the age of 12 on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975.”
The Kite Runner by Khalid Hosseini.
My son left his copy of this book here after a Christmas visit home. I began reading it and found myself quickly caught up in the story that traces its way back to that freezing winter, just before the Russian invasion of Kabul, and the dreadful thing Amir saw “peeking into the alley near the frozen creek” that has haunted him ever since. A beautiful story of friendship across social dividing lines, loss and redemption. This is the kind of book that stays with you long after you’ve read the last page.
“It was not until several weeks after he had decided to murder his wife that Doctor Bickleigh took any active steps in the matter.”
Malice Aforethought by Francis Isles
The kind of opening line that defies you not to read on. First published in 1931, Malice Aforethought is as much a black comedy as a crime story. The wife in question is made sufficiently awful that we understand the doctor’s point of view but he himself is hard to sympathise with. Set in a suffocatingly proper, hypocritical , appearance-is-all English village where Bickliegh conducts several clandestine affairs, it’s all a bit Agatha Christie meets Midsomer Murders. A hell of an entertaining read concluding with a rather delicious twist of fate.
“When I saw Finn waiting at the corner of the street I knew at once that something had gone wrong.”
Under the Net, Iris Murdoch.
Iris Murdoch has sadly fallen out of fashion now. You seldom hear anything about her. A philosopher and academic, her style may not sit well with the short attention span, social media fixated, instant gratification society we’ve become. But her books repay the time it might take to read them. A slice of 1950’s London life featuring Jake, a hack writer and his sidekick, Finn, Hugo Bellfounder, a fireworks manufacturer and film studio owner, Samuel “Sacred Sammy” Starfield the bookie and a film star Alsatian called Mr Mars. This is a book to make you both think and laugh.
What did you think of my choices? Any of your favourites here or any you now want to read? Let me know in the comments.
Talking of books, I liked this piece by Janice Eastman using one of my fovourite books to illustrate courage.
