This is my first column of 2009. It's also my last. And not just of 2009. It's been a pleasure, being given the chance to witter on about books every fortnight, but I've done it for just over three years and, having finally admitted, at the end of last year, that my literary hero, John Updike, has jumped the shark with his last book, the time has come for me to lock the Times.doc folder before this column similarly straps on a pair of water skis and heads for hammerhead-infested waters. Always best to leave them wanting more.

How does one end, though? How does one use words to say goodbye in a way that says more than just goodbye? The place to look, obviously, is books. Interestingly, though, classic endlines are far fewer on the ground than openers. For every “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” or “yes I said yes I will Yes” there are five “Call me Ishmael”s or ten “It is a truth universally acknowledged”s.

The only ones I can call to mind quickly, besides the two already mentioned (which you of course will have recognised as the closing lines of The Great Gatsby and Ulysses, respectively) are Emily Brontë wondering “how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth” in Wuthering Heights, Tristram Shandy's mum asking “what is all this story about?” and being told “A COCK AND A BULL ... and one of the best of its kind I ever heard”, and Marlow, at the end of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, staring, naturally, into “the heart of an immense darkness”.

Clearly, there is a straightforward economic reason for the preponderance of memorable first lines over lasts. Authors know that bookshop browsers open a book at the start, not the end, and are much more likely to buy if the first line reels them in: hence Anthony Burgess's expertly designed opener to Earthly Powers: “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.”

The American Book Review (ABR) did once publish a list of the 100 Best Last Lines in Literature, but even these sometimes falter in comparison with their own first lines. Lolita, for example, is in at No11, with “And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita”, but I'm not sure that isn't knocked into a Nabokovian hat by (and only given poetic resonance through echoing) “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins”.

Very rarely, the same text's last and first lines vie for classic status. I say rarely: two. 1984 - Start: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” End: “He loved Big Brother.” And A Tale of Two Cities, which begins, one would have thought unbeatably, with “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”, etc, but also ends, fantastically, with “It is a far, far better thing I do, than I have ever done”, etc.

Reading through the ABR list of Last Lines, however, makes me think that, as quotations, they provide a different and perhaps more subtle pleasure than openers. Particularly with books I've never read. I have never read, for example, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, but note that it makes No10 on a separate ABR list of First Lines for “I am an invisible man” which, granted, is to the point, but surely not as poignant or mysterious as its closing sentence: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”

The interesting thing about this - or “There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air” from Kate Chopin's The Awakening; or “It was the nightmare of real things, the fallen wonder of the world” from Don DeLillo's The Names - is that, despite being the end, these words intrigue: they make me want to read more. There are ends that are beginnings.

So that is the end lesson learnt: parting words must leave the reader with a desire to restart, to go back and reread. All the pressure, of course, is really on the final sentence. This is, after all, what will be remembered, and one doesn't want to get it wrong, like those people whose last words before dying are “Oh I feel much better now”. What's wanted - what is expected - is an aperçu; an epiphany; a perfectly crafted, hand-tooled nugget of poetic insight; a - oh, I've run out of space.

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