The rationale
I wrote this piece about three years ago, and initially didn’t dare publish it as I was worried I might fall foul of copyright law. However, I like it too much to let it sit in my ‘Miscellaneous Projects’ folder gathering dust, so I’ve decided to publish it with the proviso that, if it turns out I’m breaching anyone’s copyright, I will take it down immediately. It is not my intention to deprive anyone of the credit that is their due, so I have provided references for all the novels cited and links to their pages on Amazon – so if you’re struck by a particular line, you can buy the book and find out how it reads in its own context.
What inspired this piece? Well, I found myself intrigued by how much the opening of a novel determines our reaction to the tale as it unfolds. Does the story start here because it has to: because that’s the true beginning? Or is it just random: could it start anywhere? Is the beginning of one story the middle – or even the end – of another? I decided to pull together the first lines of a number of different novels, to see if I could come up with something resembling a coherent narrative, or whether the lines were just too embedded in their status as ‘openings’ to make sense any other way. I was surprised to find that, in a slightly surreal kind of way, the resulting narrative did indeed make a kind of sense. The quotation from Graham Greene towards the end probably sums it all up.
Read on to see if you agree.
Once upon a time…
Mother died today; it was the day my grandmother exploded. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen: it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink; if I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me.
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born – somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember (a squat grey building of only thirty-four stories) – and what my lousy childhood was like. I was born twice; I am an invisible man. Call me Ishmael. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow: all children, except one, grow up. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.
For a long time, I went to bed early. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love. Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. 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 drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended. It is a truth universally acknowledged that in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.
On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish; Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress: it was love at first sight. These two very old people are the father and mother of Mr Bucket.
It was 7 minutes after midnight. In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together: Dr Iannis had enjoyed a satisfactory day in which none of his patients had died or got any worse; Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do. On they went, singing ‘Eternal Memory’, and whenever they stopped, the sound of their feet, the horses and the gusts of wind seemed to carry on their singing.
Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. Mr Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he stayed up all night, was seated at the breakfast table. The boy with fair hair (called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it) lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way towards the lagoon. There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
All this happened, more or less. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space: last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. You better not never tell nobody but God. “To be born again,” sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, “first you have to die”. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. It was a pleasure to burn.
References
Albert Camus: L’Etranger
Iain Banks: The Crow Road
Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway
George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four
Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities
William Gibson: Neuromancer
Dodie Smith: I Capture the Castle
Saul Bellow: Herzog
JD Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye
Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
Jeffrey Eugenides: Middlesex
Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man
Herman Melville: Moby-Dick
Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina
Harper Lee: To Kill A Mockingbird
JM Barrie: Peter Pan
Charles Dickens: David Copperfield
Marcel Proust: In Search Of Lost Time Vol 1: Swann’s Way
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim
Raphael Sabatini: Scaramouche
Gabriel García Márquez: Love in the Time of Cholera
DH Lawrence: Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Ernest Hemingway: A Farewell to Arms
JK Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath
Arthur C. Clarke: 2001: A Space Odyssey
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice
JRR Tolkien: The Hobbit
Virginia Woolf: Orlando
Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment
Sylvia Plath: The Bell Jar
Edith Wharton: Ethan Frome
Ernest Hemingway: The Old Man and the Sea
George Eliot: Middlemarch
Joseph Heller: Catch-22
Roald Dahl: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Mark Haddon: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Carson McCullers: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Louis De Bernières: Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
Lewis Carroll: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Boris Pasternak: Doctor Zhivago
Gabriel García Márquez: The Autumn of the Patriarch
Franz Kafka: The Trial
Arthur Conan Doyle: The Hound of the Baskervilles
William Golding: Lord of the Flies
CS Lewis: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre
Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse-Five
LP Hartley: The Go-Between
Margaret Atwood: Cat’s Eye
Daphne Du Maurier: Rebecca
Graham Greene: The End of the Affair
Alice Walker: The Color Purple
Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses
Samuel Beckett: Murphy
Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
