Which book has the best opening lines?
When I started as an apprentice electrician, I hadn't read anything literary. The only book that I remember us reading at school was Clive King's Stig of the Dump. A year later, when we were fifteen and knew everything, we almost read John Christopher's brilliant sci-fi novel of environmental catastrophe The Death of Grass. But we stopped after a couple of chapters because the class hated it. We did West Side Story instead. I guess that might have been because it was the east-end of Glasgow, and our English English teacher thought we'd be able relate to violent gang fights. The experience made three lasting impressions:
- firstly that I hated English teachers;
- secondly, that the idea of relevance was a repugnant one - and thirdly,
- a lifelong and totally unjustified hatred of poor old Lenny Bernstein's music.
When I started as an apprentice, the EETPU shop-steward told me that I should be reading Camus and Kafka. He wasn't the sort of person who suggested things, so at the end of my 39-hour week and with my newfound wealth of £38.17 minus travel expenses, minus the pocket money that I was told that I had to give my younger brother, minus my mum's dig money, minus money to buy tools, I managed to put a little aside to buy Albert Camus' The Outsider at the end of the first month and Franz Kafka's The Trial at the end of the next. I bought both books from that great Glaswegian institution of John Smith and Sons on St. Vincent Street. It's long gone now, of course, but it became part of my life after that first visit. And even though it's gone, it still is.
The question at the top of this post was asked by Laura Hackett in The Times newspaper's Culture newsletter. Paraphrasing Tolstoy, Ms. Hackett observes that books with great opening lines are all uniquely different. For my part the choice was straightforward. It was either
Camus' Outsider:
Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday. The telegram didn't say.
or,
Kafka's Trial:
Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.
Twenty years later, when I left Glasgow City Council's employ, that same shop steward wrote The Outsider's opening lines in my going away card. The ones I've automatically signed tend to contain nothing better than façile "good luck" wishes. No-one, in my experience, really wants to tell the truth. But after all that time, he'd remembered. And it seemed like perhaps in buying those books at his "suggestion" that that had mattered something to him. I hadn't known that. The Camus book has been lost along the way, but I still have the Kafka. It's been with me my whole adult life. Strange things books.
In the end, it had to be the Kafka. Nothing was quite the same after both books. But it had to be the Kafka.
I replied to Ms. Hackett, and was chuffed to see it selected the following week:
