Top 10 Openings
July 3, 2008 – 7:11 pm
After yesterday’s deep thoughts, I have decided a little bit of light fun would be the order of the day. So I have made a top ten list. Here is my own personal TOP 10 best opening sentences of a novel. Let’s get started, shall we?
TEN—
Company
Max Barry
Monday morning and there’s one less donut than there should be.
Max Barry is an Australian with a wicked sense of humor. His books are satirical and scathing, and often with a bull’s-eye painted on the back of corporate America. His third book, COMPANY, came in number 8 on a list of top 100 “people, ideas, and trends that will change how we work and live in 2005,” in a November 2004 issue of the magazine Fast Company. It ruthlessly skewers cubicle life, sometimes with a chainsaw, other times with a laser, but always with a laugh. One of the subplots involves office donuts. So, as any good opening line does, Max Barry’s first sentence gives us place and time without going into boring specifics (if it’s Monday morning, then it has to be set in an office) as well as the absurd conflict that is about to arise. Who ate the last donut?
NINE –
The Gunslinger
Stephen King
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
Stephen King’s magnum opus begins with a sentence that sums up the entire plot as well as King’s massive appeal to readers. He raises questions in our minds, questions that need answering, questions with answers found on the next page perhaps. Thus, the reader flips through page after page at lightning speed as answers are revealed while new questions arise, often in the same breath. Who is the man in black? Who is the gunslinger? Why is he following him? And where is he following him to? Why can’t I put this book down?
EIGHT –
Castle Roogna
Piers Anthony
Millie the ghost was beautiful.
Paradoxes. I love them. So does Piers Anthony. He also loves puns and play-on-words. In the case of Castle Roogna, the opening line always struck me as delightfully odd. A ghost that is physically attractive. Ghosts can’t be physically attractive because they’re not physical! This initial paradox immediately sets the rules of the story, that all the rules are going to be broken, or at the very least, bent into a crazy loop. Or a loopy craze, depending on your point of view. To find out what happened to Millie, the main character goes back in time, only to have the living Millie fall in love with him, which ultimately results in her death. So if Dor (yes, his name is Dor) did not go back in time to prevent Millie’s murder she would never have been murdered in the first place. But by going back in time and witnessing her murder, Dor learns how to resurrect her and bring her back to life. Huh? Like I said, crazy paradoxy loops abound. And they all begin with one simple sentence. Millie the ghost was beautiful.
SEVEN –
Sacred
Dennis Lehane
A piece of advice: If you ever follow someone in my neighborhood, don’t wear pink.
I am shocked Lehane did not make the top five. When I was looking through my library, making a preliminary list of my favorite opening lines, I was hardly surprised to see that every single Lehane book made the cut. To avoid having a list of a single author’s best lines, I decided to limit one entry per author. Perhaps I made the wrong choice. Perhaps the opening line of GONE, BABY, GONE would have made the top five. But I chose Sacred for a reason. Sacred, like most of Lehane’s books, is written in the first person. His main character, Patrick Kenzie, is a tough-nosed private detective from South Boston. He’s not the strongest man on the block, but he’s not afraid of roughing up to get the job done, even if it means suffering a few broken bones in the process. He has a sharp wit, and an even sharper tongue, and both get him into more trouble than he’s capable of escaping on his own. The opening line completely sets the tone of the story, and develops character at the same time. And it really is the characters that drive a Lehane story. Each one is fully fleshed out with their own style of speech, opinions, emotions, and behaviors. Lehane never resorts to stereotype, and even when he does, he surprises us by turning that stereotype on its head. Another reason the opening line of Sacred works so well, is that it serves as a disclaimer for the reader. It says, caution, you are about to read a book about a very dangerous part of of a very dangerous town inhabited by a very dangerous cast of characters. People get hurt, people fall in and out of love, and people get their noses broken in the process. So if you are brave enough to continue reading, let me give you a piece of advice: Don’t wear pink.
SIX –
Queen of the South
Arturo Perez-Reverte
The telephone rang, and she knew she was going to die.
Like Dennis Lehane, every single Reverte novel made the first preliminary list. Those who know me well know Reverte is one of my favorite authors of all time. Every time I open one of his books, I know I’m in good hands. It is almost as if the author has a hand on my shoulder, saying “Come with me, let me tell you a story.” QUEEN OF THE SOUTH is no exception. It begins with a woman in trouble. Deep trouble. The phone ringing off the hook is a special cellular phone, giving to her by her cesna pilot drug runner boyfriend. He gave it to her with a warning, that if it rings, then it means he is dead and it is time for her to run as fast as she can for as long as she can, because people are coming to kill her. The opening line serves as a shot of adrenaline you’ll need to keep up as this woman in danger packs a single duffle bag and races onto a dirty street in Mexico without any shoes and without any money.
FIVE –
The Dain Curse
Dashiell Hammett
It was a diamond alright, shining in the grass half a dozen feet from the blue brick wall.
This one was a little unfair. I’ve always been a big fan of Dash Hammett. His wit and dry sense of humor make even his shortest story memorable. But sometimes you hear so much about a book or a story that when you finally experience it for yourself, you’re left disappointed because you know all the surprises beforehand. You know every twist and turn. One of my writing teachers defines boredom as “when what you think is going to happens, actually happens.” I thought that was the case. In THE DAIN CURSE, Dash’s most enduring character, the Continental Op, squares off against evil cultists and their unholy temple. Even the title prepares you for a story about the supernatural. However, from the opening line, Hammett proves why he is the master of detective fiction. He knows how to surprise the reader. The first time I read The Dain Curse, I must have reread the opening line six or seven times. Diamonds? In fact, the first third of the book is about stolen diamonds. But where is the evil cult? Where is the curse? Where are the Dains? Well, as they say, read and find out.
FOUR –
Watership Down
Richard Adams
The primroses were over.
“It’s about rabbits,” people would tell me. Sorry, not very convincing. Even though I read a book about a Toad, a Mole, a Badger, and a Vole, I wasn’t about to read a book about rabbits. One day, while I was visiting my Aunt in Iowa, she tried like so many have tried before. I remained unconvinced. Then she read me a short, simple sentence about primroses. She said it was the best opening line of all time, and you could see the heartache in her face as she read it to me, then clutched the book to her chest. Hmm. Maybe I should give it a shot, I thought to myself. The story is a classic example of Joseph Campbell’s comparative mythology HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES. It tells a story of heroism, exile, survival, and political responsibility while drawing comparisons to classics such as THE ODYSSEY and THE AENEID, and like Homer and Virgil, Richard Adams created a story that will endure throughout time, all while managing to be a simple story about rabbits that begins with a simple sentence about primroses.
THREE –
The Elf Queen of Shannara
Terry Brooks
Fire.
I really wanted to put Elf Queen at number one, for a variety of reasons. Not only is the single word the opening sentence, it is also the opening paragraph. The lone word is a striking visual image that is easily conjured in the reader’s mind, and that image carries a train load of emotions and feelings. When I first cracked open this book, in the Terminal of the Washington-Dulles Airport in 1992 (I bought the hardback in a bookstore in the same airport on a family vacation to Baltimore), I was instantly struck with a deep sense of foreboding and anticipation. I knew immediately that something bad was about to happen, and I couldn’t wait to read about it. That one word sent ripples of fear throughout every fiber of my body. At the same time, I was struck by the fact that a single word could trigger such a deluge of emotions, so much so that to this day I still remember vividly buying this book when I was only twelve. It was the first time I realized the power of not only words, and not just the power of one word, but the true power of the RIGHT word.
TWO –
The Odyssey
Homer
Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy.
Like Elf Queen above, I feel as though Homer’s epic deserves to be number one. It will have to be content with runner up. I don’t even know where to begin. I was shocked by twice while reading the Odyssey. One, that the poem has a very modern non-linear plot structure, and two, that the choices of women impact the stories events as much as the choices of men. The tale is so modern, in fact, that it serves as the inspiration for countless movies and books set in modern landscapes, such as the world of baseball. The story is so human that it has become ingrained into our DNA. Imagine, a story written in the 8th century BC that is about a modern man, a man driven off course time and time again, often due to the involvements of a woman.
ONE –
The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
Holden Caulfield is an icon. He is the poster boy for teenage angst. He is jaded, cynical, and yet innocent at the same time. And it is these contradictions that make him so fascinating to follow, and yet so easy to connect with. Salinger’s masterpiece is required reading in almost all high schools in America, and for good reason. Holden Caulfield struggles with the very same issues every teenager in America faces. And perhaps that is the beauty of this opening line. Right from the starter’s gun, every teenage reader has connected and identified with Caulfield. They see his struggles as their struggles, his failures become their failures, and his rebellion their rebellion. Catcher in the Rye is one of the most controversial books in America, resulting in it being the most banned book in the country. Perhaps this is because the protesting parents have forgotten what it really meant to be young, innocent, reckless, and dangerous. Or perhaps as they were running for the cliff, someone waiting in the rye caught them, and they remained innocent forever. Or perhaps no one was waiting for them, and they lost their innocence, and are afraid their children will lose theirs as well.
I’ll finish with a quote from the original dust jacket, possibly written by Salinger himself.
“Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it.”
Chris