Call me Oliver. Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – I was still at school and, if we were good, the last ten minutes of an English lesson were given over to a form of literary parlour game: guess the first line. A teacher would read the opening of whatever book was to hand, and we would attempt to identify the novel it began. I recommend it for Christmases in families of keen readers, and while ‘For a long time I went to bed early’ shouldn’t be too tricky, ‘Take my camel, dear’, or even ‘The cow is there’ might stump a few. Others are better known, from the bright cold day in April 1984 when the clocks struck 13 to the queer sultry summer when they electrocuted the Rosenbergs. Most famous of all, perhaps, is Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers, with its self-consciously provocative commingling of archbishop and catamite.

One may as well begin with Ulysses’ beginning. Burgess once wrote a whole essay on its opening paragraphs, and you need not have read the book entire for a bell to ring at the sound of ‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead…’. It takes a second, or a second reading, to realise that the carefully placed comma means that Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead in a stately manner, that ‘stately’ is an adverb (‘statelyly’), and that Buck is not habitually stately. He is habitually plump and, we soon gather, habitually vulgar, so his stateliness is comic, as much of Joyce’s stately plump novel will be. Imagine ‘Plump Buck Mulligan walked in a stately fashion from the stairhead…’, ridding Ulysses of its vital upbeat. Or, worse, ‘Buck Mulligan, who was plump…’.

Consider another alternative opening. ‘Kate Croy waited for her father to come in…’. But Henry James decided to begin The Wings of the Dove with a syntactical limp: ‘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…’. As the book will reveal, Kate, who is never Katherine, is as wounded as the syntax, unable quite to be the subject of a sentence, a novel, or a love affair. James presents us, as the mantelpiece mirror does, with two Kates, caught in the act of self-scrutiny, pale to the point of disintegration, and pared to monosyllables.

The critic Eric Griffiths, in an otherwise caustic television appearance appraising the 1990 Booker prize shortlist, praised Brian Moore’s terrific thriller Lies of Silence for its opening sentence: ‘At a quarter to nine, just before going off work, Dillon went down to reception to check the staff roster for tomorrow.’ Susannah Clapp, in the London Review of Books, castigated him for his silliness but missed his reasoning: ‘fifty pages later the question of whether something takes place at a quarter to nine or a quarter to eight is going to be absolutely crucial’. The seeming mundanity was critical to the plot, proof of Moore’s characteristically astonishing tightness of construction, and of the way in which a good first line can reveal something about the book itself.

Take Dickens, a reliable master of opening lines, and, indeed, closing ones (it is a truth universally acknowledged that, aside from A Tale of Two Cities, few novels have first and last sentences which enter the language). Holden Caulfield dismissed ‘all that David Copperfield kind of crap… where I was born, and what my childhood was like’. But what about Bleak House: ‘London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets…’ and so on. It takes three extensive paragraphs for Dickens to include a finite clause, meaning that, for a long while, the syntax is as foggy as the streets Dickens is describing: the reader cannot see through the syntactical pea-souper to work out whether the action is taking place in the past or present. This is a point of grammar relevant to the book entire, which, concerned above all with how the past wounds and scars the present, interleaves a present-tense, third-person, unnamed speaker with a perfect-tense narration by Esther Summerson.

Little Dorrit opens: ‘Chapter 1. Sun and Shadow. Thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun, one day.’ That ‘Chapter 1’ must be included, for only then can the ‘un’ sound toll properly through the line in its carefully symmetrical order (‘one – sun – sun – one’). The short vowels are in careful cross-stitch with the longer ones, casting their long shadows: Marseilles and lay, shadow and ago. And so a pattern of counterpoint is introduced to a novel rich with doublings and predicated on contrasts, between light and shadow, poverty and riches, good and evil. Little Dorrit, with its fortunes that arrive from nowhere, its house on stilts, its wicked identical twins, is in part a fairy tale, and fairy tales begin long ago, once upon a time. Yet how differently, how neatly Dickens could have started: ‘One day, thirty years ago, Marseilles lay burning in the sun.’ Brisk, bright, jovial, even chatty – until the more jagged rearrangement introduces the grave enchanted oddity that will suffuse the book entire.

Jane Eyre likewise unfolds from the tone of disappointment and dashed expectation that is introduced by ‘There was no possibility of taking a walk that day’, which can be read aloud with the stress on at least four of the words, each version subtly altering the sense. This opening, which refuses to reveal whether the novel is to be told in the first or third person, speaks of a day recollected across distance (‘that day’). Another novel by Charlotte Brontë, The Professor, nonchalantly recalls the recent past (‘The other day, in looking over my papers’). One day, that day, the other day – all novels must start (like Henry Green’s Loving) ‘once upon a day’, even if they can’t all end (as Green’s does) ‘happily ever after’. The reader is often located specifically and imprecisely. As Winnie has it, in Beckett’s Happy Days: ‘That day… What day?’

Wuthering Heights carefully sets itself 46 years in the past for its first readership: ‘1801. – I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.’ But unlike, say, Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which begins by urgently taking the reader’s hand – ‘You must go back with me to the autumn of 1827’ – Wuthering Heights will for now be told in the moment, and to the moment: ‘I have just returned…’. (The novel would exert a much looser grip had it begun: ‘Half-a-century ago, in the county of –––shire, there lived a wealthy gentleman by the name of Lockwood….’) The tense – the present-perfect – links past to present in a way that will become important in the novel’s multi-generational tangles. So eager is the speaker to tell us what he has just done that he speaks in starts, distractedly, a burst of afterthought marked not with a comma but a dash. His diction is happy, too, in those more formal days, to end a sentence with a preposition. How much more formal, and more troubled, he would sound had he said ‘the solitary neighbour with which I shall be troubled’.

We do not yet know that Mr Lockwood is speaking, only that the narrator is a tenant, nor where he is speaking, only that it is barely populated, nor that Nelly Dean will soon take over, and that Wuthering Heights will prove to be built from Russian dolls, speaker within speaker, as if a work of oral history, a saga handed down over the generations and providing a mythology for the moors. Heathcliff and Cathy are gods as well as people, lying at the end beneath and part of their landscape, as Lockwood wonders ‘how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth’. By this time the plot has forcibly rearranged its opening sentence. At first it seems that Lockwood is saying ‘I have just returned from a visit to my landlord, the only neighbour that I’ll have to bother about.’ Only later can a reader, realising the careful ambiguity of ‘solitary’ and ‘troubled’, see what he meant: ‘I have just returned from a visit to my landlord, my lonely and companionless neighbour, whose behaviour will trouble me.’ And so it will.

The final round of the opening-line game, as I recall, was to invent the first line of a novel we had not read. Someone came up with ‘the house was not bleak to begin with’, which – with its echoes of Jacob Marley, who was dead, to begin with – struck me as rather good, and a line that would make me want to continue. I was given Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man and, flummoxed, oh-so-wittily suggested ‘I am an invisible man’. Full marks. The best opening lines do what it says on the tin; the worst… don’t get me started.