Minute by minute, hour by hour, day by excruciatingly long day, my mother-in-law fights for her life. It’s been two weeks today since her surgery, an eight-hour ordeal involving a team of twelve people, a myriad of machines, and some perilously frail heart and lung tissues that may or may not finally heal. The hospital (like an airport, but for different reasons) seems to operate on a separate plane of time. Minutes seem like hours, then hours become minutes, depending on her condition. My dear father-in-law sits through the days and nights, watching the monitors, jumping up to arrange a pillow, massage a knot in an aching shoulder, or move a tube so that a beeping noise stops. They both look exhausted, and because of the respirator she no longer speaks, yet there is as much courage on display in this little room as in the noisiest foxhole in battle. For death is an enemy that cannot, in the end, be defeated, yet these two fight on bravely, bringing to this last contest the grace and dignity with which they have lived their lives.
The Value of One Life
Though I can escape into the sun and sky, my daily visits to the hospital remind me that this struggle to remain alive is being repeated today in millions of places on the planet. The value of one life is staggering to contemplate, when you realize how easily human life can be obliterated. What makes us cling so tenaciously to life? What is the importance of each individual? These are the questions at the heart of a stirring novel by Bryce Courtenay, The Power of One. This story of an English boy raised in South Africa is a daunting account of one small life pitted against a world of hatred. In an environment where survival seems impossible, this lonely little boy finds a way to triumph over his enemies and be true to his friends.
Peekay is in a difficult position. An English boy sent to a South African boarding school at the age of five, he finds himself the whipping boy for the Afrikaaner students, who are Nazi sympathizers and hate the British for the atrocities of the Boer war. Peekay doesn’t understand any of this, but finds hatred and persecution at every turn. His torments are recreated for us in grim detail. I must warn LDS readers at the outset that this book contains a good deal of foul language and some graphic violence, though its overall message is profoundly moral. When the book came out in 1989 teachers were so impressed with its message that they petitioned the author to create a version more suitable for children. Thus, an expurgated version of this novel is available, and I would recommend it for those who will find the swearing offensive.
Coming of Age in Africa
Peekay becomes a boxer, yet he also becomes a horticulturist, a musician, and an academic scholar. What he does not become is a bitter, twisted man, because of the influence of two or three guiding personalities in his life. His father is dead and his mother is largely useless, so Peekay finds mentors to guide him. His Zulu nanny gives him love, and the conductor on the train to school gives him a quest: to become the welterweight champion of the world. He also gives him a motto that becomes his guiding mantra, which, because he learned it on a train, seems to speak to him from the tracks:
“I stood there watching the early morning folding back. It can be very cold in the lowveld before the sun rises, and without a blanket I soon began to shiver. I tried to ignore the cold, concentrating on the lickity-clack of the carriage wheels. I became aware that the lickity-clack was talking to me: Mix-the-head with-the-heart you’re-ahead from-the-start. Mix-the-head with-the-heart you’re-ahead from-the-start, the wheels chanted until my head began to pound with the rhythm. It was becoming the plan I would follow for the remainder of my life; it was to become the secret ingredient in what I thought of as the power of one.” (104)
Peekay meets some unique individuals, and finds himself in the middle of a political and racial storm, as the Afrikaaners round up Germans for prison (with whom many actually sympathize) while giving the English token support along with private hostility. A German doctor, horticulturist and musician befriends the lonely boy and teaches him to be proud of his good mind rather than try to hide it. Much of the book deals with Peekay’s attempts to soften the harsh effects of war on the old man. In the meantime he learns to fight, and pursues his boxing career with the same zeal as his studies, becoming a legend along the way through some remarkable successes.
Courtenay is a good writer but not a great one. He has some fine descriptive passages, but is somewhat weak when it comes to really fleshing out a believable character. His good guys are a little too good to be true, and the bad ones are over-the-top. The Zulu nanny is all love and wisdom, while his white, Evangelical Christian mother is weak and hypocritical. His strength is in his ability to evoke a landscape, and a culture, that is completely unfamiliar to most of us, and use it as a backdrop for a more familiar emotional landscape that we all share. Here is a description of some lonely moments on a hillside, mourning the loss of his nanny:
“As I sat on the rock high on my hill, and as the sun began to set over the bushveld, I grew up. Just like that. The loneliness birds stopped laying stone eggs, they rose from their stone nests and flapped away on their ugly wings and the eggs they left behind crumbled into dust. A fierce, howling wind came along and blew the dust away until I was empty inside.
I knew they would be back but that, for the moment, I was alone. That I had permission from myself to love whomsoever I wished. The cords that bound me to the past had been severed. The emptiness was a new kind of loneliness, a free kind of loneliness. Not the kind that laid stone eggs deep inside of you until you filled up with heaviness and despair. I knew that when the bone-beaked birds returned I would be in control, master of loneliness and no longer its servant.
You may ask how a six-year-old could think like this. I can only answer that one did.” (142)
It is natural for this narrator to be somewhat defensive, because it really is a bit of a stretch to believe that a six-year-old could elucidate such thoughts as these. With that nit-picking aside, I recommend this novel because of its untiring optimism in the face of overwhelming evil. Peekay finds beauty, grace and humor in the most trying circumstances. In an evil world he happens upon good people who become trusted friends.
His ability to assimilate information and his persistence give him an advantage that overshadows his liabilities of size and status.
Bryce Courtenay is in demand as a motivational speaker. His novel is clearly written with a purpose: to help us believe in the value of each individual and in the power of each individual to triumph over adversity and make a positive contribution to the world. For that effort we must applaud him. I’d be interested to know what many of you thought about The Power of One. And, when things are back to normal around here, I’m going to pass my copy along to my mother and father-in-law.
The Power of One is the September selection for the Best Books Club. If you’d like to get on the email list write me at be*******@me******.com“>bestbooks@meridian .com, or log on to our website at www.thebestbooksclub.com. Our selection for October will be: The Reivers, by William Faulkner.
