Opening Lines

Today’s page from The Writer’s block is about opening lines. Apparently, editors often use the ‘Airport Test’ on manuscripts – if you read the opening line in an airport bookshop, would you buy the book before boarding the plane?

It offers one from a master of the art:

‘The decision to bomb the office of the radical Jew lawyer was reached with relative ease.’ (The Chamber, by John Grisham).
It then suggests picking five of your favourite novels to see if they pass the airport test. Instead, I’ve picked my favourite novel, two that I didn’t finish, the book I’m currently reading and a classic. See if you can classify them.

Dame Agnes de Mordaunt was sitting in the window of her chamber, looking out over the garden of the House of Mary at Clerkenwell.

We – the five Roman Catholics – were walking back from the bus stop up the drive to school, fresh from Mass, when Barrowsmith and four or five of his Neanderthals started chanting ‘Papist Dogs’ and ‘Fenian traitors’ at us.

The sun rose up from behind the concrete of the block of flats opposite, beaming straight into their faces.

I address these lines – written in India – to my relatives in England.

‘And don’t forget’, my father would say, as if he expected me at any moment to up and leave to seek my fortune in the wide world, ‘whatever you learn about people, however bad they turn out, each one of them has a heart, and each one of them was once a tiny baby sucking his mother’s milk...’