January 2007: The Power of One

Bryce Courtenay

"Everything but Sex (Lack of Time)"
by Christopher Lehman-Haupt
New York Times Book Review
June 19, 1999

If a shrewdly programmed computer were to design the ultimate international best seller, it couldn't do much better than this first novel by Bryce Courtenay, an advertising man from Sydney, Australia.

On almost any scale of measurement, ''The Power of One'' has everything: suspense, the exotic, violence; snakes, bats and Nazis; mysticism, psychology and magic; schoolboy adventures, drama in the boxing ring and disasters in a copper mine. It's even got a Jewish joke: Why did the piece of bread dropped by the little cobbler in the shtetl fall with the honeyed side up? Because he had honeyed it on the wrong side.

In fact, the only thing missing in ''The Power of One'' is sex. And this lack can't be attributed to any modesty on the author's part. It's just that Mr. Courtenay's hero hasn't time for sex. He's too busy growing up and triumphing over the incredible odds against him.

Any summary of ''The Power of One'' is bound to make it sound unbelievable. Its 5-year-old hero, a South African boy of English descent known simply as Peekay, seems a little on the young side to be torn away from his Zulu nanny and sent to a boarding school where he is brutally persecuted by the older Afrikaners for the role of his presumed ancestors in the Boer War.

There's a comic-book quality to the way Peekay's scrawny pet chicken, Granpa Chook, tries to protect his master and to the violence with which Granpa Chook is killed by the Afrikaner known as the Judge, who has tattooed his arm with a swastika in anticipation of Adolf Hitler's arrival in South Africa.

And the prose can be irritatingly cute and sentimental. ''By bedtime Nanny was at my side as usual, arriving with a large sweet potato, its tummy open with a spoon sticking out of the middle, tiny wisps of steam curling upwards and condensing on the handle. There is something about a sweet potato that cheers you up when you are low and celebrates with you when you are happy. Sweet potatoes baked in their jackets have a very large comfort factor built into them.''

Still, Peekay's story races along. His family gets him released from the terrible school. On the train going home he meets a boxer who inspires him to become the welterweight champion of the world. At home, he is befriended by a botanist and musician named Karl von Vollensteen whom Peekay calls Doc and who tells Peekay to stand on one leg and say: ''No matter what has happened bad, today I'm finished being sad. Absoloodle!''

When World War II begins and Doc gets arrested for being a German alien, Peekay is allowed to pay regular visits to the prison, where he discovers a boxing team and a half-caste inmate named Geel Piet who is willing to train him in exchange for certain favors.

Despite your better instincts you get involved in ''The Power of One.'' You accept Mr. Courtenay as a natural if somewhat naive storyteller, and the incredibility of it all begins to dissolve. What did the trick for this reader happened to be Doc's speech to Peekay's born-again Christian mother on the subject of the cactus. ''God and I have no quarrels, madame,'' Doc says. ''The Almighty conceived the cactus plant. If God would choose a plant to represent him, I think he would choose of all plants the cactus. The cactus has all the blessings he tried, but mostly failed, to give to man. . . . It is the plant of patience and solitude, love and madness, ugliness and beauty, toughness and gentleness. Of all plants, surely God made the cactus in his own image? It has my enduring respect and is my passion.''

But for other readers the hook may be the moment when Peekay, as a 6-year-old, boxes his first three rounds and wins. Or when his coach, Geel Piet, is secretly beaten to death by a racist prison administrator. Or when Peekay first discovers the Power of One, ''that in each of us there burns a flame of independence that must never be allowed to go out.''

Or when Doc von Vollensteen gives a piano concert for the prisoners and plays for them his newly composed ''Concerto for the Great Southland,'' which incorporates the melodies of the inmates' various tribal songs: ''Never had a composer's work had a stranger debut and never a greater one. Eventually the composition would be played by philharmonic and symphony orchestras around the world, accompanied by some of the world's most famous choirs, but it would never sound better than it did under the African moon in the prison yard when 350 black inmates lost themselves in their pride and love for their tribal lands.''

According to the novel's concluding biographical note, Mr. Courtenay was born in South Africa, was educated there and in England and, in 1958, immigrated to Australia, where he went into the advertising business. If the old cliche is true that copywriters are frustrated novelists, then Mr. Courtenay should be ''finished being sad,'' as Doc von Vollensteen would say.

Absoloodle!

December 2006: Bel Canto

Ann Patchett

"Uninvited Guests Wearing You Down? Listen to Opera."
by Janet Maslin
New York Times Book Review
May 31, 2001

In a novel that begins with a kiss and absolutely deserves one, the most powerful electronics executive in Japan is invited to celebrate his birthday in a South American country. This place is unnamed and, as will be instantly demonstrated, unstable. Midway through the lavish party, terrorists appear and take the guests hostage, including the most celebrated person on the premises.

The whole birthday event was contrived as a bribe in hope that a factory would be built by Mr. Hosokawa, the music-loving founder and chairman of the Nansei Corporation. And his precious birthday gift had arrived in the form of the world-renowned lyric soprano Roxane Coss. She is a great beauty, with a voice that makes listeners melt, and said to ''make Callas look like a spear carrier'' in the bargain.

''Italy, England and America,'' the astounded diva chants to herself as the terrorists take over, vowing never to take on lucrative but iffy singing jobs outside those three reliable nations again. As for the other guests, forced to the floor, they begin to talk and murmur ''until the room became a cocktail party in which everyone was lying prone.'' And somehow, what initially looked like a frightening situation becomes instead a peculiarly entrancing one, as it becomes clear that partygoers, generals and guerrillas will all be trapped for an indefinite period in the vice president's mansion. The president, whom the terrorists had hoped to capture, had been otherwise engaged because his favorite soap opera was on television.

Now it is real opera that becomes foremost in this elegantly alluring book, as the international group of detainees find that music has become their common language. The one thing they share is rapture at the beauty of Roxane's voice, and rest assured that she knows how to use it. When one of the generals in charge of the siege tries to deny Roxane a box of sheet music, she says to Mr. Hosokawa's translator (who is suddenly the most valuable person on the premises): ''Tell him that's it. Either he gives me that box right now or you will not hear another note out of me or that piano for the duration of this failed social experiment.''

''Really?'' the translator asks.

''I don't bluff,'' Roxane answers.

One of the delightful things about the way ''Bel Canto'' unfolds is the way Ann Patchett uses the ordeal of entrapment to locate unexpected resources in her characters, like Roxane's new leadership potential. Another surprising quality to emerge, in a book that works both as a paean to art and beauty and a subtly sly comedy of manners, is the flair that the host shows for running the household, once he realizes that being taken hostage has ruined his political career. ''With a dish towel knotted around his waist, he took on the qualities of a charming hotel concierge. He would ask, 'Would you like some tea?' He would ask, 'Would it be too much of an imposition to vacuum beneath the chair in which you were sitting?' Everyone was very fond of Ruben. Everyone had completely forgotten that he was the vice president of the country.''

As the book moves along and a new, impromptu civilization is born beneath the vice president's roof, Ms. Patchett, whose earlier books include ''The Patron Saint of Liars'' and ''The Magician's Assistant,'' lets her characters' new lives bloom like flowers. The quality of enchantment even goes so far as to let one of the soldiers, after all the female hostages except Roxane have been freed, turn out to be a beautiful young woman named Carmen. Fair enough, a book with opera in its soul needs a Carmen, even if this one has never heard such singing before. And even if she is here mostly to fall in love with the Japanese translator during 2 a.m. language lessons in the china closet. Although this novel is entirely housebound, at the vice presidential mansion, Ms. Patchett works wonders to avoid any sense of claustrophobia and keeps the place fresh at every turn.

''The soldiers spent most of their days exploring the house, eating the pistachio nuts they found in the pantry, sniffing the lavender hand lotion in the bathroom,'' she writes, while the library full of leather furniture and leather-bound books ''had the comforting and familiar smell of cows standing in the hot sun.'' For all the 58 people who are ultimately trapped here, this place comes to represent both an end and a beginning, a chance to experience the aesthetic and the sensual, to fall in love with music and experience, while their lives hang in the balance. Like Mr. Hosokawa, who once felt that ''the records he cherished, the rare opportunities to see a live performance, those were the marks by which he gauged his ability to love,'' they spend every moment of this crisis in a state of being newly alive.

And what of the power of politics over art? Well, one of the more humorous moments in the novel concerns an effort to make the translator ask Roxane to help with the cooking, but she soon puts a stop to that. Then the three ruling generals have a conversation about perhaps forcing her to sing in Spanish instead of Italian, or trying to regulate the hours when she practices. ''If we put a gun to her head she would sing all day,'' suggests the most rigid of them. Replies the wisest general: ''Try it first with a bird.''