39 ms·
It sets the scene really well: "A bright, cold day in April" is evocative of exactly that. It's not pretentious and it immediately puts a setting in the readers
by nagrom 14y ago
It sets the scene really well: "A bright, cold day in April" is evocative of exactly that. It's not pretentious and it immediately puts a setting in the readers mind.
"and the clocks were striking thirteen." is an immediate juxtaposition of something non-intuitive. The first reaction is "Clocks don't strike thirteen! They strike a maximum of twelve!". It's just nonintuitive enough without necessarily being obviously nonsense. And so the reader is engaged to read the next sentence to find out what he means by thirteen. Get the reader to read the next sentence enough, and you've tricked them into reading the book ;-)
- philh 14y agoMy first reaction is more like "okay, so it's one o'clock". I never really noticed that it was weird before, though now it's pointed out I can see that it is.
- fastball 14y agoI think this opening line works better for people that don't use 24 hour time (namely Americans). That is interesting, because Orwell was British, and I am fairly certain that 24 hour time was adopted in Britain before 1948.
- pcrh 14y agoThe 24 hour clock is still not universally adopted in the UK. No English speaker says says "thirteen O'Clock" the way one might say "treize heures". English speakers might say "thirteen hundred hours", but only in restricted circumstances (e.g. in the military).