Picnic

This picture is in the National Gallery of Victoria. It inspired Joan Lindsay’s 1967 novel Picnic at Hanging Rock. Some great novels have a great first sentence.

A personal favourite is: “People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day”. (True Grit, Charles Portis, 1968.)

Earthly Powers, Anthony Burgess (1980) is by no means a great novel and its first sentence is quoted more often than it’s read:

It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.

And here’s another: “ 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”. (The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger, 1951.)

Pickers at Hangers begins with this foreword:

Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves. As the fateful picnic took place in the year nineteen hundred, and all the characters who appear in this book are long since dead, it hardly seems important.

It’s an intriguing opening. The book spawned a film in 1975 and a TV adaptation this year on BBC 2. The film wrapped it all up in less than two hours, the TV series runs for a numbing six hours. We have watched the first two episodes but I doubt we will see the rest. Back to University Challenge, Minder, The Professionals and the last few episodes of The Avengers.