The 2007 Tournament of Books wrapped up on Friday, and this year I found myself glued to each daily showdown, unusually. This despite a particularly poor show on my part, but then again it hardly matters. I suppose it’s ridiculous to become caught up in a literary competition so random and imbalanced, but is it any more ridiculous than devoting Sunday afternoons to clashes between sports teams with an outcome equally arbitrary and susceptible to chance?
I had read exactly one novel going in (the pleasant but forgettable Alentejo Blue), but by the end of Round One I’d also spent a weekend devouring The Road by Cormac McCarthy. After that it didn’t much matter what else was in the running; I had a favourite to win. It seemed natural then, as The Road was ushered quietly through each round to take the title. Almost a given.
The Road is one of the best novels I’ve read in years (which translates to my lifetime). McCarthy’s austere, functional prose focused on a bleak, unending and entirely possible future. A hopeless thread of a story turns the pages. After finally putting it down that Saturday night I woke up early Sunday to finish it before breakfast, then wandered around the house for a few hours numbly wondering how a book could still affect me so.
My dad introduced me to McCarthy when I was nineteen, bugging me for days to read The Border Trilogy. I eventually began with The Crossing, striding out of my room thirty seconds later to read him, with emphasis on each ‘and’, the following sentence:
He pulled his breeches off the footboard of the bed and got his shirt and his blanketlined duckingcoat and got his boots from under the bed and went out to the kitchen and dressed in the dark by the faint warmth of the stove and held the boots to the windowlight to pair them left and right and pulled them on and rose and went to the kitchen door and stepped out and closed the door behind him.
Later on I understood.