The novel pleasure of a first line

A work can recover from a duff opening, but a duff ending echoes in the mind like a cracked bell

CONGRATULATIONS ARE due to Mr David Chuter, who has just won the very amusing Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for the worst imaginable opening sentence for a novel. His entry runs "Through the gathering gloom of a late October afternoon, along the greasy cracked paving stones slick from the sputum of the sky, Stanley Ruddlethorp wearily trudged up the hill from the cemetery where his wife, sister, brother and three children were all buried, and forced open the door of his decaying house, blissfully unaware of the catastrophe that was soon to devastate his life."

Very good; I particularly admire that "blissfully". First lines are a traumatic challenge to the novelist's abilities; I expect that many novelists have sat over a completed novel for weeks, trying to come up with a more sparkling opening. The trouble is that the mere title of many a great novel calls up an unforgettable first line: "Call me Ishmael." "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins." "For a long time I have been going to bed early."

The nervous faith of many novelists in the importance of a really good first line has, unfortunately, led a lot of them to try to be interesting at once. It is difficult to produce a line, like Jane Austen or Proust, that will slide down easily, and reverberate with secret meanings over hundreds of pages. Impossible, for most novelists, to think of one like the superb line of conversation at the beginning of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks - "And - and - what comes next?" - the full meaning of which becomes clear only when the reader has finished the book.

It is much easier to plunge the reader into the action immediately, or to produce a smart and strikingly odd opening. There is a perhaps apocryphal first sentence that goes: "Bang! Bang! Bang! Three bullets shot into my groin, and I was off on the most exciting adventure of my life." That may not be real, but it's not entirely unconvincing.

Anthony Burgess was a master of the Baroque first sentence - the most concise is the rumbling fart that begins the Enderby Trilogy: "Pfffrrrummmp." He outdid even himself in Earthly Powers, however: "It was the afternoon of my 81st birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite, when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me."

Everyone has a prejudice or two about openings. Personally, I need a bit of persuading that any novel could be good which announces the forename and surname of its protagonist in its first line - yes, I know this rules out Emma and other great novels, but it's always seemed a bit pompous. A duff first line can't kill a great novel, but it can certainly hobble it for a long stretch.

All the same, I can't quite go along with the assumption of the Bulwer- Lytton contest that good novels have good opening lines. Most great novels have startlingly bland opening lines about the weather - I honestly can't see what is wrong with Bulwer-Lytton's "It was a dark and stormy night", which has been much ridiculed and led to this competition being named after him. It doesn't seem any worse than Jane Eyre's "There was no possibility of taking a walk that day", which is a standard opening, acquiring magic only through familiarity.

And plenty of novelists seem utterly uninterested in contriving an attention- grabbing first sentence. Dickens has one or two, as in A Christmas Carol's "Marley was dead, to begin with." But most are nothing-in-particular, or worse; if there is a more confusing first line in the language than that of Barnaby Rudge, I don't want to know it. Joseph Conrad, who has a strong claim to be the most cunning novelist in English, never bothers and his novels characteristically get under way in a operatically rumbling account of the scenery.

On the whole, I think last lines are more important than first ones; a novel can recover from a duff opening, but a duff ending reverberates in the mind like a cracked bell. I can see that the Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizak's epic The Makioka Sisters is a great novel, but I can't love a book that ends: "Yukiko's diarrhoea persisted throughout the 26th, and was a problem on the train to Tokyo."

If you want to see how irrelevant the quality of a first line is, however, just enter this one for the next Bulwer-Lytton contest: "Well, prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes!" A truly terrible line, instantly confusing, with almost nothing to do with the novel that follows, and promising nothing much. It would certainly win any contest for naffness; unfortunately - I bet you didn't recognise it - it also happens to be the first line of War and Peace.