It is a truth universally acknowledged – and a must – that a good book has a good first line. With it comes an extraordinary responsibility: not merely to begin the story, but to establish the writer’s voice.
Asking someone to name the best first line of all time tends to make people skittish. So I asked myself a slightly different question:
What are the three best first lines in all of fiction?
The answer, inevitably, depends on what we mean by best. A first line can be memorable because it is beautiful, because it is startling, because it introduces a voice we immediately want to follow. Or because, in a handful of words, it manages to contain an entire world.
My three choices do a little of all these things. They are lines that announce themselves with such confidence that, having read them once, you are unlikely ever to forget them. More importantly, each makes a promise to the reader and then spends the rest of the novel keeping it.
So, in no particular order, here they are.
Call me Ishmael.
Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Three words. No description, no explanation, no elaborate scene-setting; just a voice speaking directly to us, with the strange intimacy of someone introducing himself before telling us something important.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four; the first half is perfectly ordinary. The second quietly destroys that sense of ordinary life.
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina; the line sounds almost like a proverb, but it is also a thesis statement for one of the great novels about love, marriage, jealousy and unhappiness.
• • •
Three openings, three voices, three very different kinds of invitation. And perhaps that is what the best first lines have in common: they do not simply open a book. They open a door.
“I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.” Dodie Smith ‘I Capture the Castle’.