A Memorable Opening

A Master Class from Robert Harris

I’m doing some preliminary research for book three and mentioned to a workshop colleague that I have been reading Robert Harris’s excellent thriller Enigma. I would imagine it’s been quite a while since she read it, but she told me the powerful beginning ‘Cambridge in the freezing cold’ had stayed with her. I had another look at the opening, appropriately on one of the freezing November days we’ve been having lately, in order to see why Harris’s description is so memorable. Here are the first few lines:

            Cambridge in the fourth winter of the war: a ghost town.

            A ceaseless Siberian wind with nothing to blunt its edge for a thousand miles whipped off the North Sea and swept low across the Fens. It rattled the signs to the air-raid shelters in Trinity New Court and battered on the boarded-up windows of King’s College Chapel. It prowled through the quadrangles and staircases, confining the few dons and students still in residence to their rooms. By mid-afternoon the narrow cobbled streets were deserted. By nightfall, with not a light to be seen, the university was returned to a darkness it hadn’t known since the middle ages. A procession of monks shuffling over Magdalene Bridge on the way to Vespers would scarcely have seemed out of place.

So, what is Harris telling us in this opening? Well first of all, that it’s very cold although that adjective doesn’t appear at all. In fact he isn’t telling us it’s cold, he’s showing us. And to do that he uses the senses. So we feel the ‘ceaseless Siberian wind’; we hear the air-raid shelters rattling and the windows being ‘battered,’ intensified by the almost onomatopoeic repetition of the ‘t’ sound; we see the ‘darkness.’ The effect is further increased by the personification of the wind as it ‘prowled’ through the quadrangles and staircases. There is something sinister about these predatory movements, foregrounding the frightening events to come.

We are also given a strong sense of setting through the proper nouns: Cambridge, Trinity New Court and King’s College Chapel, giving the scene an aura of authenticity and grounding it in a locality. But there is a sense of scale too – geographically with the ‘Siberian wind’ and temporally with the sense that the ‘centuries had dissolved.’ This links to the feeling of timelessness that Harris generates, that although we are given a date (‘the fourth winter of the war’) and location (‘Cambridge’) we also realise that the state of war somehow transcends these details.

The opening is also filmic – we have the big sweep of time and space before we focus on our protagonist: ‘It was to this bleak spot … that there came … a young mathematician named Thomas Jericho.’ It is as if the camera is panning around before closing up on Jericho’s figure, a powerful way to draw us in.

There is a semantic field of the supernatural with the reference to ‘ghost town’ and the strange noises and lack of light contributing to this almost gothic beginning.

What a powerful opening: the use of the senses, the filmic quality, the strong sense of place and time against a backdrop of timelessness, the gothic feel. Who wouldn’t be hooked? And who wouldn’t remember this for a long time to come?