How Novels Work
It is an interesting question that anyone with an interest in literature may have pondered more than once in their lives - just how does a novel work? John Mullan, drawing on his columns for The Guardian, makes an attempt to answer this question in his book How Novels Work, just published in paperback. In the following excerpt, John examines the opening of a book...
The Opening
When we talk about famous openings of novels we usually mean resonant first sentences rather than beautifully crafted first scenes or chapters. The memorable first sentence will epitomize in a small way the logic of the novel as a whole. Those famous openings of Pride and Prejudice (1813) or Anna Karenina (1873-7) are not merely clever statements in themselves, they are also perfect specimens of their different authors' narrative spirit and confidence. In some novels, the first sentence can enact the shock of entering a world governed by perverse rules. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is exemplary. 'It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.' The statement is made as if it were natural and already we are made to inhabit the logic of a dystopia. Something is very wrong but nobody inside the book notices. Comparable is the opening sentence of Kafka's The Trial (1925), which can be translated into English as 'Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.' This gives us the novel's synthesis of banal normality and paranoia, but in the original German the effect is the more unsettling. 'Jemand mußte Josef K. verleumdet haben, denn ohne daß er etwas Böses getan hätte, wurde er eines Morgens verhaftet.' The past tense of 'mußte' and the subjunctive of 'hätte' (expressing uncertainty) imply that this sentence is free indirect discourse: it follows the thoughts of the character. His innocence is his self-image, not the narrator's assurance.
In a comparable vein, the thriller writer Ruth Rendell also likes to open with a simple yet disturbed statement. 'The world began to fall apart at nine in the evening': The Crocodile Bird (1993). 'Violent death fascinates people': The Bridesmaid (1989). 'The clothes of the dead won't wear long': The Brimstone Wedding (1995). At once, you are to be unsettled. The arresting opening statement epitomizes her method. Typically, her novels take you into the strange reasoning of twisted characters. In The Killing Doll (1984) a teenager thinks that he has made a pact with the Devil. In Going Wrong (1990) a criminal mistakenly believes that a glamorous, upper-class woman is in love with him. Each novel invites us to inhabit some parallel world of obsession or deranged conviction. The narrator will record deluded thought processes, yet without the distance that would permit judgement.
John Mullan
22/02/08
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