Rereading: The Go-Between by LP Hartley | Books | The Guardian Rereading Rereading: The Go-Between by LP Hartley A story of lost innocence, hypocrisy and Britishness – but LP Hartley's masterpiece can also be read as a sophisticated gay novel Julie Christie in Joseph Losey's 1970 film of The Go-Between. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar Ali Smith Friday 17 June 2011 18.55 EDT First published on Friday 17 June 2011 18.55 EDT Share on Messenger Close "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." For the past year or so, when I've been giving readings, I've asked the people in the audience if they know or remember LP Hartley's 1953 novel, The Go-Between. Generally there's a single yes or a couple of yeses; otherwise silence, a shaking of heads. Then I'll say the first half of its first line and the audience will come back loud and strong on their own with the second half.

Certainly Hartley and his multi-awardwinning work (his Eustace and Hilda trilogy, completed in 1947, was hugely acclaimed, and the film version of his 1957 novel, The Hireling, won the main award at Cannes in 1973) have all but disappeared from contemporary literary consciousness. I first read his best-known novel, The Go-Between, at the age of 16 in 1979 (in a Penguin copy with Julie Christie under a parasol on the front, a still from Joseph Losey's 1970 film adaptation), because Hartley was the most contemporary writer on our Sixth Year Studies English course. I opened the same book again for the first time in three decades a couple of years ago. Can a book ambush you? From the prologue ("Are you vanquished, Colston, are you vanquished?") to the epilogue ("Tell him there's no spell or curse except an unloving heart") it felt, as I reread, uncannily familiar, like something I knew – and had no idea I knew – by heart. A combination of knowing and not-knowing is this novel's driving force.

It announced itself to Hartley when he was in Venice in May 1952, working on a completely different project; he put it immediately aside and wrote The Go-Between quite fast, revising his draft as soon as October and November. It's set at – or rather, framed by – the mid-point of the 20th century, "the most changeful half a century in history", when Leo Colston, a man in his mid-60s, sits down in a drab realist 1950s room, the rain hammering at the window, to sort through some old papers. Almost straight away he comes upon a red cardboard box once used for his childhood Eton collars: in it are inconsequential odds and ends; some dried-up sea-urchins, some rusty magnets, "which had almost lost their magnetism", and a diary. He picks each thing up in turn.

"Something came and went between us: the intimate pleasure of recognition." But about the "Diary for the year 1900", with its Zodiac figures circling the announcement of this new "Golden Age", the "glorious destiny of the 20th century", he can remember nothing except a sense of baleful loss. He opens it: the combination lock, which he knows without knowing, is set to the letters of his own name. His own long-gone story breaks open on him all over again. Leo is 12 years old and visiting his upper-class schoolfriend Marcus's family seat, Brandham Hall in Norfolk, in the summer of 1900. He is wearing his too-hot Norfolk jacket (which makes him a sort of clothing joke), having come away unprepared for heat, in fact confident there wouldn't be any such thing, since he considers himself something of a magician; in the novel's prologue he relates how a curse he wrote in blood in his diary last term has caused two bullies to concuss themselves by falling off the school roof. He has ordered up a cool summer in the same way. But the summer is hotter than is imaginable.

"In the heat, the commonest objects changed their nature. Walls, trees, the very ground one trod on, instead of being cool were warm to the touch: and the sense of touch is the most transfiguring of all the senses . . . In the heat the senses, the mind, the heart, the body, all told a different tale. One felt another person, one was another person." He also happens to be a lesser person at Brandham Hall, a mere mortal among its rich gods and goddesses. "For the first time I was acutely aware of social inferiority." He keeps his lower status a secret, though Marcus's mother, Mrs Maudsley (there's a nice Tennysonian hum to her name) has an Elizabethan ability to fix you like a pinned butterfly with her gaze. Marcus's older sister, Marian, is Leo's first encounter with beauty – as if he has met not a person but a concept. "So that is what it is to be beautiful, I thought." Marian, delightful, intuits Leo's embarrassment, keeps his secret about his lack of correct clothing and sweeps him off to Norwich where she buys him a cool green suit.

She is positioned to marry the local Viscount Winlove, Hugh Trimingham, back from the Boer war with half his face scarred so badly that he looks like the god Janus, Leo thinks; one side an end and the other a beginning. Trimingham goes about his business wounded and elegant at once, with a great deal more knowledge of what's happening than he lets on. What's happening is this: the facts of life are about to be taught to Leo, a boy so naive that at first it's comic, then it hurts the heart. As the mercury rises, Leo becomes a kind of Mercury himself, a deliverer of messages between Marian and her lower-class lover, the tenant farmer and local "ladykiller", Ted Burgess, who promises to teach Leo what's what when it comes to "spooning". Much of the novel's humour lies in Leo's sweet literalness, and in the interlocked layers of knowing and unknowing viewed by Colston 50 years on, then by us, far off in our so-knowing future. His prepubescent blankness, when it comes to what "spooning" might be, makes for both funniness and discomfort. Do lady killers really kill ladies?

Meanwhile, he can't say the name Hugh without it sounding, to Marian, like the word "who" or the word "you" – this in a book very much about identity, about who we are in the personal, the social, the historical and the natural senses. Leo is a boy who loves words, was bullied in the first place for using the long word vanquished in his diary for a football match victory; when his curses, astonishingly, seem to have taken effect he ponders what the action of putting words on paper might mean. "It was then I began to cherish a dream of becoming a writer – perhaps the greatest writer of the greatest century, the 20th." His new clothes, his very greenness, liberate him, make a hero of him, and at the same time are his downfall. As much as it is a revelation of the childishness of social hierarchy, of human delusions of power, and of the tragedy inevitable where war or history and innocence meet, Hartley's novel is a fine disquisition on appearance versus naked truth.

"In those days dress was much more ceremonious and jackets were not lightly discarded." Clothes in the novel demonstrate societal stricture, so that the revelation, not just of the sexual act, but of the cross-class sexual act, is contextualised as all the more unthinkable. A beautifully poised bathing scene ("the word denoted an intenser experience than it does now") highlights the apartness of men and women and the frissons of the body. Leo observes the beautiful cornfield-coloured body of Ted Burgess for the first time; it "spoke to me of something I did not know . . . maturity in its most undeniable form", lying near-naked in the reeds, smiling "an intimate, pleased smile, that would have looked childish or imbecile on most people, but on him had the effect of a feather on a tiger." The more clothes Ted had on, "the less he looked himself".

This is a novel of memorably dressed-up theatrical set-pieces: a cricket match that is a little class-war in itself; a concert at which the tension between tenants and landlords, village and Hall, is overshone by a moment that's half real innocence, half hopeless sentimentality; a fierce earthy battle between Leo and a Freudianly insidious Atropa Belladonna (deadly nightshade). The novel signals itself and its seeming concerns almost too clearly – the beautiful doomed farmer cleaning his gun so assiduously. In fact its self-conscious narrative quality, at a glance, can seem a little crude, like a too-obvious jigsaw. But to think this is – yes – naive: The Go-Between is a work winged at the heel and rises above its earthy self in a voice that's expansive. More: something radical happens when this seeming crudeness and this real elegance come together – a revelation of narrative's own naivety in a book very much about the clichés of story, the pressures to conform and the losses and tragedies that arise from such pressures. It is a masterpiece of double-speak and secrecy, somehow both ambiguous and direct.

It works a magic on obviousness, so that it becomes a novel about British embarrassment and embarrassing Britishness. It's a book which subtly, almost mischievously, rejects subtlety: "the facts of life were a mystery to me, though several of my schoolfellows claimed to have penetrated it." But couched and quiet at its centre is a whole other novel at a further level of knowing, innocence and unsaidness. Now, in a reread, I can see what I certainly couldn't consciously have seen or said in 1979, that Leo, in love with both the concept of Marian and the "half-unwilling gentleness", the feather on the tiger, the "natural" body of Burgess, is a go-between in quite another way. With its vision of "foreignness", of the marginalisations inherent in class and sexuality, of the different possible self, the "different tale", it can also be seen as a gentle gay novel, and one of immense sophistication.

Part defeated by repression, part glorious in discretion, part melodrama, part Hardy, part Lawrence; I wonder if its appearance in 1953 and its boldness then with the more surface issues of class and sexuality are partly responsible for Lady Chatterley's Lover finally seeing unexpurgated publication, which it did a decade after the appearance of The Go-Between. Its spirit, unlike Chatterley's, is gloomed, overshadowed by terrible new knowledge, two world wars, the Holocaust and the atom bomb: an "abyss", as Hartley puts it, at the core of the glorious new century. Hartley returns again and again in his critical essays, bewilderedly, as if he can't look away, to this "abyss". So the novel looks backwards in essence, but one half of its face, its war-scarred, war-numbed half, looks forwards, towards Larkin, towards the literary realism of the late 1950s and early 60s. Its voice is echoed today in writers such as Colm Tóibín, John Banville, Paul Bailey, Alan Hollinghurst.

It's no surprise that the film director Losey adapted it and included it in his trilogy of radical works examining Englishness, class, repression and morality alongside The Servant and Accident; the screenplay of The Go-Between is a pristine and skilful reworking by Harold Pinter. Mercury is the god of communication, the god of thieves, the god of artists, the god of the conduit between living souls and dead souls. This novel, a revelation of the tragedy of hypocrisy and the workings of power, of the human need for "calumny" to be "more colourful than it is", also communicates images of a magnetism so strong that "with its strength went a suggestion of beauty and mystery that took hold of my imagination in spite of all my prejudice". It is full of images of rebirth, the most astonishing of which is the final image of the much older Leo literally revisiting his past and coming away again with yet one more romantic errand to run. The real revelation is of something which soars above social hierarchy and even the 20th-century abyss. It is both subtle and crass: a modern kind of sublime.

"One remembers things at different levels." The Go-Between is about books as much as it's about memory. It's a model of the importance of rereading (and God knows we treat books lightly – we wouldn't, after all, expect to know a piece of music properly on just one listen), knowledge and innocence so much part of its structure as to make it a knowingly different book on revisiting. Above all, though, it is a text which works like a charm: books are, in essence, go-betweens, works which conjure rhythm and release across time and history, across places of familiarity and those foreign to us; and personally and individually, too, it's all a going-between, for every person who picks up a book for a first, then a second, then a third time. Ali Smith's There But For The is published by Hamish Hamilton. Lucy Palmer: books that changed me | The Border Mail Lucy Palmer: books that changed me 5 Aug 2016, 9 p.m. Lucy Palmer is an award-winning journalist and documentary maker, writer and editor. She lives in the NSW Southern Highlands with her children.

Lucy Palmer: books that changed me Lucy Palmer, author of A Bird on My Shoulder. Photo: Andy Toohey ╳ exit Lucy Palmer is an award-winning journalist and documentary maker, writer and editor. She lives in the NSW Southern Highlands with her children. A Bird on My Shoulder (Allen & Unwin) is her memoir about being left to manage a farm and family after her husband died. The Go-Between L.P. Hartley As a teenager in the 1970s, reading this English novel affirmed my long-held suspicions – adults lie. The Go-Between is a spellbinding tale of shattered innocence, hypocrisy, secrets and a sexual affair destroyed by the British class divide, all subjects close to my heart. I still read it – my original copy – every two years or so. It begins with the memorable line, "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." Lolita Vladimir Nabokov When I first read Lolita, I was completely seduced by the playful joy of its language. "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.

My sin, my soul." Controversy aside, Nabokov broke so many conventions concerning style – veering from conspiratorial confession to whimsical, teasing depravity. Reading Lolita in my early 20s was like being trapped inside the mind of a brilliant maniac – I had never been so enslaved and enraptured by words alone. Middlemarch George Eliot Having spent most of my life in small towns, I instinctively recognised so many of the characters in this wonderful, towering novel. Cynics, losers, social climbers and the morally corrupt are fantastically portrayed in all their contradictions and failings. I loved Eliot's formidable style and insights into the human condition, especially her tribute to the vast numbers of forgotten people who have "lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs". Alias Grace Margaret Atwood I can only describe the reading of Alias Grace as an absolute joy. Atwood's cool control of her characters and the pace and tone of this novel at times made me sigh out loud. "I whisper it over to myself: Murderess, Murderess.

It rustles, like a taffeta skirt across the floor." The novel is a stunning examination of the vulnerability and strength of women, and an exploration of their historically maligned mental powers. Conference 2016: Modernity & the European Mind: Writing the Past, Constructing Identities - University of Portsmouth Conference 2016: Modernity & the European Mind: Writing the Past, Constructing Identities Centre for Studies in Literature Conference 2016: Modernity & the European Mind: Writing the Past, Constructing Identities A two-day international symposium hosted by the Centre for Studies in Literature at the University of Portsmouth: Thursday, 16th June & Friday, 17th June 2016 In 1953, L.P. Hartley famously opened his novel The Go Between with the line "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there". Yet, despite this alleged ‘difference’ and metaphorical ‘foreignness’ of the past, contemporary Culture and Literature put great emphasis on (re)presentations of it.

This conference aims to investigate and debate the various representations and rewritings of the modern European past and, in particular, to assess their link to the construction of identities – personal, local, regional, national. Bringing together academics from a variety of disciplines, creative practitioners, storytellers and representatives of various local communities, the conference wants to create a sense of (his)stories of the past and their importance in and for the present. Topics may include: Uses of the past in modern European culture National, local and regional identities Stories of minority communities in Europe, past and present Minority Literatures (and their translations) The importance of the ‘past’ for the creation of local, regional and national identities The representation of local communities in literature The Go-Between | Off the Shelf The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley A man looks back on his life to remember the hot English summer of 1900 when, as a schoolboy, he went to stay with a friend in a grand country house and found himself acting as the go-between for a pair of star-crossed lovers. “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there” is the famous opening line, and, as the novel progresses, this statement plays out with devastating consequences.

Not a mystery so much as a tragedy, THE GO-BETWEEN is elegantly written and has a strong sense of place; most satisfying of all, there’s a perfect inevitability to the unfolding story and its ultimate conclusion. MENTIONED IN: By Kate Morton | Monday, August 01, 2016 Close 20 Great Opening Lines to Inspire the Start of Your Story 20 Great Opening Lines to Inspire the Start of Your Story By Mark Nichol As Glinda the Good Witch says in The Wizard of Oz, “It’s always best to start at the beginning.” That’s where editors and literary agents generally get going, so perhaps you should, too. Here are some strategies, accompanied by exemplars from literature, for making the first line of your novel or short story stand out so that the reader can’t help but go on to the second and the third and so on to see what else you have to say: 1. Absurd “‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.” — Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond Are you in the mood for amusement?

This opening line makes it clear that farce is in force. 2. Acerbic “The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.” — G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill Astute observations accompanied by a implied sigh of disgust are tricky to master, but Chesterton, one of the most multifaceted men of letters, lights the way for you with this sample of the form. 3. Bleak “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” — William Gibson, Neuromancer Oh, by the way, just in case you missed the forecast? Don’t expect any fluffy bunnies or fragrant blossoms or dulcet giggles to show up in this seminal cyberpunk story. A spot-on metaphor expresses the story’s nihilism, letting you know what you’re in for and lugubriously inviting you in. 4. Confiding “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.” — C. S.

Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader The author of the Chronicles of Narnia no sooner introduces by name a new character in the latest installment than, in just five more words, he succeeds in telling you everything you need to know about him. Well, got that out of the way. 5. Cynical “Justice? — You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.” — William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own Somebody got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning — and maybe the bed’s shoved up against the wall, and that attitude is a permanent condition. The stage is set for an unhappy beginning, middle, and ending. 6. Disorienting “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” — George Orwell, 1984 Ho-hum — huh? Orwell’s opening line creates a slight but immediate discordance that sets you up for an unsettling experience. 7.

Enigmatic “Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person.” — Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups It will not surprise you to learn that the protagonist sets about retracing her steps and striving to correct the error, but after reading this subtle but striking first line, can you resist finding out how she does it? 8. Epigrammatic “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” — L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between This offbeat observation from Hartley’s novel of painful reminiscence is a blindsidingly original statement that one will feel compelled to read about just how the writer acquired this wisdom. 9. Expository “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others.

He told us about Christ’s disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen, and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.” — Norman McLean, A River Runs Through It By the end of this paragraph, you already know a great deal about the narrator’s family (especially the father) — but thanks to the introduction, as clear as a snow-fed mountain river, you want to know more. 10. Foreboding “I have never begun a novel with more misgiving.” — W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge The author is a bit intrusive here, true enough, but it is kind of him to let us know that we’re in for a bit of unpleasantness. But if he can express such profound reluctance, it must be quite a story. 11. Gritty “There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight.

Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.” — Raymond Chandler, Red Wind Chandler, the master of hard-bitten crime noir, makes it obvious that this story is not going to end well. You can almost hear the smoky, whiskey-soured, world-weary narration in your head. And this quote comes from one of Chandler’s half-forgotten short stories. 12. Inviting “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.” — Charles Dickens, David Copperfield Dickens extends his arm toward the passageway within, welcoming you to enter what promises to be an entertaining story. 13.

Picaresque “In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point.” — John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor Oh, but you know this novel is going to be juicy. This snide introduction to the main character conveys a promise of a continuous feed of schadenfreude. 14.

Pithy “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.” — Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God Every once in a while there comes an opening line that seems to have an entire story folded up inside it. But it’s just the label on the envelope. And I challenge you to withstand the urge to open it up and read the message. 15. Poetic “We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.” — Louise Erdrich, Tracks A somber, stately metaphor draws us in despite the pervasively gloomy imagery. 16.

Prefatory “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” — Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities Many people associate Dickens with whimsy and eccentricity, but A Tale of Two Cities is a stern study of the insanity of mob rule, and this floridly eloquent prologue sets the stage like the presenter of a Shakespearean prologue: “Epic Ahead.” 17. Romantic “He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” — Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche Romantic, that is, in the sense of lust for life, not love for another. This author of swashbucklers like The Sea Hawk and Captain Blood (and, of course, Scaramouche) lets you know right away that you are about to meet someone larger than life. 18.

Sarcastic “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” — Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice Austen didn’t invent the word snark — but she certainly refined the application of the quality. Notice, though, how subtle this line is. It’s a bon mot — understated, yet with teeth behind that prim smile. 19. Sour “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.” — J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye Can you find it in your heart to forgive this young man his grievously bad attitude? More likely, you’ll be impressed by — and want to immerse yourself in more of — his insolence. 20.

Unexpected “Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu.” — Ha Jin, Waiting This seemingly pedestrian introduction upends itself with an intriguing premise that raises a question in the reader’s mind that must be answered. Subscribe to Receive our Articles and Exercises via Email You will improve your English in only 5 minutes per day, guaranteed! Subscribers get access to our exercise archives, writing courses, writing jobs and much more! You'll also get three bonus ebooks completely free! 17 Responses to “20 Great Opening Lines to Inspire the Start of Your Story” Bella Street on April 05, 2011 10:06 am Thanks for posting this list. It’s a lot of fun and a great way to start a writing day 🙂 Rebecca on April 05, 2011 10:15 am Thank you for sharing these fabulous opening lines! I love Jane Austen — Pride and Prejudice is one of my favorite books. Beverly Diehl on April 05, 2011 1:31 pm This is fabulous – thanks for sharing!

Mark on April 05, 2011 1:43 pm Well I have to share my favourite opening lines now: “It was the day my grandmother exploded!” – The Crow Road, Iain Banks “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink” – I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith In fact the full opening from the Crow Road is even better: “It was the day my grandmother exploded. I sat in the crematorium, listening to my Uncle Hamish quietly snoring in harmony to Bach’s Mass in B Minor, and I reflected that it always seemed to be death that drew me back to Gallanach.” Cate on April 05, 2011 1:51 pm I’m simultaneously inspired and intimidated. I can hardly imagine writing anything that draws readers in the way these introductions do. Must keep practicing! Allure Van Sanz on April 05, 2011 2:13 pm What a great list of opening lines! 4, 5, 12, 17 & 20 are my favorites. Thank you for compiling this list.

I thought a lot about my own style and strategies while reading it, and I’m pretty much all over the place. I do notice my tendency to start each book with dialogue, whether the style is sarcastic, foreboding, or bleak etc. Most often, the dialogue is pushed behind a beginning paragraph during edits, changing the feel of the opening. Thanks for the great read, Allure Van Sanz on April 05, 2011 2:38 pm I will always love “Once upon a time, ” the best. Lauren I. Ruiz on April 05, 2011 6:20 pm Phew! I’m glad I didn’t bypass this e-mail. By the title, I thought this article was going to offer 20 sentences that subscribers could expand upon. I love the format this article is in, though. 🙂 I knew these different types of beginnings existed, just not consciously.

David Chester on April 06, 2011 8:37 am I like the openner which is something like this: “Well unlike last time when I got too involved and gave you the run arround, this time I’m going straight for the jugular and cut out all that crap about my private life”. of course he doesn’t. The author is Don von Elsner. Terry A McNeil on April 06, 2011 9:57 am Superb! This is a charming, outstanding and quite practical posting. These devices are such wonderful tools to be used to enchant readers, create flows, spark drama, awaken minds… and so much more. Practice is key. What I deeply love about such tools is they may be applied to so many forms of writing such as fiction, poetry and most other types of narrative. Even “tweets”! With “tweets” in mind I will have a least 20 new tweets to apply and practice these ideas on today. I am cheating here a wee bit. Creating tweets for “bestdeedswords”, helps understand how to apply these tools and also selfishly carves them into the dark caverns of my eclectic memory facilities.

This is a simple personal way to store them for later use. Mark, these great posts are very useful. Thanks for your hard work and research. Thanks so very much. Hailee on April 11, 2011 1:08 am Personally, I like the way I have started all my stories. I love getting right to the action, and explaining later or in different, unique ways. I am only 14 and on my 3rd story. Rebecca on June 07, 2011 10:16 am Great post! I’ve been testing out story ideas at the Creative Copy Challenge and received favorable feedback. I think it’s time for me to write a novel. jackson on August 28, 2011 10:16 pm Well unless someones already done it I think it would be not only right but, satisfying to have endings as well.

Maddy on January 01, 2012 10:43 pm That’s the subject I’ve been researching today – one spot of advice I read was to leave the first and last lines until the novel was complete – I think it’s a useful excuse for procrastinators like me. Ro on January 14, 2012 5:11 am Great post! I’ve read some of these books and never really gave any thought to the reason why. Now I know. T on February 17, 2012 4:38 am These are all good lines. Good lines are what matter, not their location in the book. Go back and look at your favorite literature. Most of mine begin with ordinary lines. The opening sentence and paragraph do not truly need to stand out. All the better if they do, but it is not necessary. Ted Green on July 18, 2012 11:10 pm All seem to have missed Snoopy’s classic: “It was a dark and stormy night.” One of my favourites.

The Go-Between (1971) - IMDb (Los Angeles) – See all my reviews In 1900 Norfolk, England, twelve-year-old Dominic Guard (as Leo Colston) goes to spend the summer at the beautiful country estate of blond school chum Richard Gibson (as Marcus Maudsley). The lads have fun wrestling while young Mr. Guard gets to know his pal's family. His chief interest is young Mr. Gibson's alluring sister Julie Christie (as Marian). An extremely beautiful woman, Ms. Christie arouses those "coming of age" feelings in Guard. She makes a "fuss" over Guard, dressing a knee wound and buying him a new suit. While Gibson is bedridden with measles, Guard is coerced into delivering love notes as "The Go-Between" for Christie and hunky neighboring farmer Alan Bates (as Ted Burgess)... But, Christie is engaged to Edward Fox (as Hugh Trimingham), a member of her own social class. As Guard experiences his own sexual awakenings, he becomes conflicted about continuing to deliver the love notes, especially as he genuinely likes Christie and both of the men she is involved with.

This story of sex and class has some major problems - like the underwritten villainess played by Margaret Leighton, the parallel witchcraft being practiced by the protagonist, and the sputtering "flash-forward" ending. But, "The Go-Between" is a spectacular-looking film, with cinematographer Gerry Fisher and the crew making it well worth eyeing - and Joseph Losey leads Guard and his co-stars to fine performances. ******* The Go-Between (12/70) Joseph Losey ~ Dominic Guard, Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Richard Gibson 2 of 2 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes American Book Review :: Home 100 Best First Lines from Novels 1. Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851) 2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813) 3. A screaming comes across the sky. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973) 4.

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. —Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa) 5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. —Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955) 6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett) 7. riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. —James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939) 8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. —George Orwell, 1984 (1949) 9.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. —Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859) 10. I am an invisible man. —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952) 11. The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard. —Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) 12. You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. —Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) 13.

Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. —Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925; trans. Breon Mitchell) 14. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. —Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler (1979; trans. William Weaver) 15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. —Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938) 16. 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. —J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951) 17.

Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. —James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) 18. This is the saddest story I have ever heard. —Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915) 19.

I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me. —Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759–1767) 20. 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. —Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850) 21.

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. —James Joyce, Ulysses (1922) 22. It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. —Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830) 23. One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.

—Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) 24. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. —Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985) 25. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. —William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929) 26. 124 was spiteful. —Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987) 27. Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. —Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605; trans. Edith Grossman) 28. Mother died today. —Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942; trans. Stuart Gilbert) 29.

Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. —Ha Jin, Waiting (1999) 30. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. —William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984) 31. I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864; trans. Michael R. Katz) 32. Where now? Who now? When now? —Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953; trans. Patrick Bowles) 33. Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. "Stop!" cried the groaning old man at last, "Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree." —Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (1925) 34. In a sense, I am Jacob Horner. —John Barth, The End of the Road (1958) 35. It was like so, but wasn't.

—Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (1995) 36. —Money . . . in a voice that rustled. —William Gaddis, J R (1975) 37. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. —Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) 38. All this happened, more or less. —Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) 39. They shoot the white girl first. —Toni Morrison, Paradise (1998) 40. For a long time, I went to bed early. —Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (1913; trans. Lydia Davis) 41. The moment one learns English, complications set in. —Felipe Alfau, Chromos (1990) 42. Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. —Anita Brookner, The Debut (1981) 43.

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; —Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962) 44. Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. —Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) 45. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. —Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911) 46. Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal ant annexation. —Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa (1974) 47. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

—C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952) 48. 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. —Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952) 49. It was the day my grandmother exploded. —Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road (1992) 50. I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. —Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002) 51. Elmer Gantry was drunk. —Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (1927) 52. We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. —Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988) 53. It was a pleasure to burn.

—Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953) 54. 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. —Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951) 55. Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. —Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) 56.

I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho' not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call'd me. —Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719) 57. In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street. —David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988) 58. Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. —George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872) 59. It was love at first sight. —Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961) 60.

What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings? —Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971) 61. I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. —W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge (1944) 62. Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. —Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups (2001) 63. The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. —G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904) 64. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. —F.

Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925) 65. You better not never tell nobody but God. —Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982) 66. "To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die." —Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988) 67. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. —Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963) 68. Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. —David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (1987) 69. If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. —Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964) 70.

Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up. —Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear it Away (1960) 71. Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me. —GŸnter Grass, The Tin Drum (1959; trans. Ralph Manheim) 72. When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson. —Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show (1971) 73.

Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World. —Robert Coover, The Origin of the Brunists (1966) 74. She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. —Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (1902) 75. 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. —Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929) 76. "Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.

—Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond (1956) 77. 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. —Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900) 78. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. —L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953) 79. On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. —Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (1980) 80. Justice?—You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law. —William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (1994) 81.

Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. —J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973) 82. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. —Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle (1948) 83. "When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing." —Katherine Dunn, Geek Love (1983) 84.

In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point. —John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) 85. When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon. —James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss (1978) 86.

It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man. —William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (1948) 87. I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as "Claudius the Idiot," or "That Claudius," or "Claudius the Stammerer," or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best as "Poor Uncle Claudius," am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the "golden predicament" from which I have never since become disentangled. —Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934) 88.

Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women. —Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (1990) 89. I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. —Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953) 90. The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. —Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922) 91.

I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl's underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self. —John Hawkes, Second Skin (1964) 92. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. —Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche (1921) 93. Psychics can see the color of time it's blue. —Ronald Sukenick, Blown Away (1986) 94. In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together.

—Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) 95.

Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person—a shy young man about of 19 years old—who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle—a journalist, fluent in five languages—who himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened

 to learn, in a letter from the young man—a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school—that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen.

—Raymond Federman, Double or Nothing (1971) 96. Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. —Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye (1988) 97. 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. —Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928) 98. High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. —David Lodge, Changing Places (1975) 99. They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. —Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) 100. The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. —Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)

Question: Which novel begins with the line "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there"?
Answer: The Go-Between