"Even the longest novel has to begin with a single line"

"Even the longest novel has to begin with a single line," writes John Sutherland, "and that line sets the narrative on the path to its destination."

The prospective reader has, then, a number of initial "encounters" with the novel before reading it. Reviews and word of mouth may form a distant introduction. The first sight of the cover and the title, a quick-read scan of the blurb and shoutlines on the jacket form another. But the first "close" encounter will be the first line of the text. This is the moment of coupling. The following are two of the more famous first lines, or sentences, in fiction: they are much quoted and will be found in all self-respecting anthologies of quotation as stand-alone statements about the human condition.

"All happy families are alike. All unhappy families are unhappy in their own way."

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."

The first is from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, the second from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Neither assertion is at all plausible, outside the socially artificial world which the novelist has created and into which the sentences usher us. They are, in more than one sense, fictional. It is not, even in the little world of Longbourn, true that every single man in possession of a fortune, etc, must be in search of a wife. Bingley may be; Darcy certainly is not. He seems, if anything, to be infused with misogynistic Byronism. What is his first comment on Miss Bennet at the Meryton ball? "She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me; and I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men." (Swine.) These are scarcely the words of a man with a fortune in search of a wife. They indicate, rather, a rich man well aware that the mothers of England are stalking him. What the apparently universal truth at the opening of the novel lays down are the distorted parameters within which a free spirit like Elizabeth Bennet is obliged to operate - and a wholly mercenary spirit like Mrs Bennet is all too happy to operate.

So, too, with the Tolstoy. It is manifestly not true that there is only one kind of family happiness. Is the happiness of the Vicar of Wakefield's domestic circle the same as that tentative happiness reached by the hero and heroine at the conclusion of Ian McEwan's 1997 novel Enduring Love? What Tolstoy's pseudo-pontifical "truism" sets up is the large question hovering over the life choices that Anna makes. Would she have been happier had she accepted her bourgeois, limited existence and the compromised happiness it guaranteed? Or is she justified in yearning, and reaching for, something larger, with all the attendant risks? Would it really have been a happy ever-after had she never returned to Moscow and Vronsky? Had she, that is, embraced the destiny of a respectable wife and mother? Is not "happy family", in Tolstoy's world, as created in Anna Karenina, a contradiction in terms? Within the novels these over-arching statements - which echo, more or less ironically, until the last page - create a climate, or rule of life, within which the narrative operates. They put the reader on the track. They are not, to echo Austen, universal truths.

Click here to read the rest of Sutherland's ruminations on first lines, including another famous first sentence: "Call me Ishmael."

--Marshal Zeringue