The Power of One

A friend gave me this book in my twenties with the warning that it would either make me want to box or make me want to move to South Africa. Neither happened, but I understand the impulse. Bryce Courtenay's first novel is a big, shameless, propulsive story about a boy who decides he is going to be the welterweight champion of the world and then spends five hundred pages making that sound reasonable. It is not a subtle book. It is not a careful book. It is the kind of book that gets read in one long weekend and then argued about for years.

Published in 1989, The Power of One arrived when Courtenay was in his fifties, after a career in advertising. You can feel that background in the way the novel sells its own emotions. Every chapter has a hook, every setback has a lesson, and every minor character seems to arrive carrying a piece of wisdom the hero will need later. That can be exhausting. It can also be exactly what you want from a novel about a kid with nothing who talks his way into a better life.

The Boy Called Pisskop

The story begins in South Africa in 1939, with a five-year-old English-speaking boy whose mother has a nervous breakdown. He is raised for a while by a Zulu nanny, Mary Mandoma, and then sent to a boarding school where he is the youngest and smallest student. The other boys call him Pisskop, which means piss-head, because he wets the bed. They also call him rooinek, a slur for English South Africans that goes back to the Boer War.

The school is run by an Afrikaans woman with a whip and a taste for humiliation. The worst of the boys is an older child known only as the Judge, a Nazi sympathizer who has decided that the boy represents everything he hates. The Judge and his friends beat him, starve him, and make him do their homework. When the boy brings a pet chicken, Granpa Chook, back to school, the Judge kills it and forces him to eat part of it. It is a horrible sequence, and Courtenay does not soften it.

What saves the boy is not a teacher or a social worker. It is a Zulu medicine man named Inkosi-Inkosikazi, who is brought in to cure the bedwetting. The cure works, but the more important thing is what he teaches the boy: a private place in his mind with three waterfalls and ten stepping stones, where he can go when the world is too much. The boy also learns a phrase that becomes the book's title, the power of one, the idea that one person can change a situation if he refuses to be afraid.

The Train and the Teacher

On the train to Barberton, where his mother has gone to live after leaving the institution, the boy meets Hoppie Groenewald, a boxer and a talker. Hoppie lets him hold his gloves, takes him to a fight, and gives him the line that the novel repeats for the next four hundred pages: first with your head, then with your heart. It is good advice for boxing and better advice for living, and the boy takes it literally. By the time the train pulls in, he has decided to become the welterweight champion of the world.

Barberton gives him two more teachers. The first is Doc, a German professor of music and botany who has been interned as an enemy alien. Doc lives in the prison but is allowed to tend his cactus garden, and he teaches the boy piano, German, and a kind of disciplined curiosity. The second is Geel Piet, a prisoner who runs the boxing squad and teaches him how to move, how to feint, and how to take a punch. Geel Piet is a small, funny, damaged man, and his murder by a warder is one of the novel's real gut punches.

The prison chapters are where the book becomes something more than a boys' adventure. The boy runs errands for the prisoners, carries letters, smuggles tobacco, and becomes a mascot they call the Tadpole Angel. He sees the machinery of apartheid up close, though he does not yet have the language for it. He also sees that the people inside the prison are more generous to him than the people outside who are supposed to care for him. That inversion is the moral center of the novel.

Johannesburg and the Business of Winning

At twelve, the boy wins a scholarship to the Prince of Wales School in Johannesburg. There he meets Morrie Levy, the son of a Jewish millionaire, who becomes his manager, his business partner, and his closest friend. Together they run small scams, sell things to other boys, and build a reputation. Morrie is the brains, the boy is the muscle, and their friendship is one of the few relationships in the book that feels equal.

Boxing becomes the organizing principle of his life. He trains with Solly Goldman, a legendary coach, and starts winning. He faces Gideon Mandoma, the son of his old nanny, in a fight that carries more weight than any title. He excels at rugby and academics. He is, for a while, a stranger to failure. Then Doc dies, and the Rhodes scholarship he was counting on goes to someone else, and the neat ladder he has been climbing falls apart.

This is the part of the book that works best for me. Success in The Power of One is not a straight line, and the setbacks are not just plot obstacles. Doc's death takes away the adult who saw him as a whole person rather than a project. The lost scholarship takes away the plan. What is left is a young man who has been trained to fight but has not yet decided what he is fighting for.

The Mines and the Judge

He goes to Northern Rhodesia to work in the copper mines, partly to build up his body for the welterweight division and partly to get away from everything he knows. The mine is another education. He works as a grizzly man, one of the most dangerous jobs underground, and he meets Rasputin, a Georgian miner who becomes a friend and then a sacrifice. When an accident traps them, Rasputin saves the boy and dies in the process, leaving him enough money to go to Oxford.

Before he leaves, he runs into the Judge again. The Judge is now a broken, violent man working with explosives, and he tries to kill him. The fight that follows is the novel's climax, and it is deliberately mythic. The boy uses everything he has learned, from Geel Piet's footwork to Hoppie's advice, and he wins. Then he carves a Union Jack and his initials over the swastika on the Judge's arm. It is a childish gesture, and the book knows it. That is part of the point.

The ending is not really an ending. He is still young, still ambitious, and still carrying the people who died for him. The novel closes with him walking into the night, which is the kind of image Courtenay loves. It works because the book has earned a certain amount of swagger. It has also earned a certain amount of skepticism.

The Film and the Reputation

The 1992 film version is worth mentioning because it shows what the novel loses when it is compressed. Directed by John G. Avildsen, who had already made Rocky and The Karate Kid, the film keeps the boxing, the prison, and the friendship with Doc, but it flattens the South African politics into background color. Morgan Freeman plays Geel Piet, which is good casting, and the movie is watchable. It is also much smaller than the book.

In Australia, the novel became a kind of institution. It was voted onto lists of favorite books, taught in schools, and passed around families. Courtenay went on to write many more novels, most of them historical epics with the same love of unlikely heroes and long odds. None of them had quite the same grip. The Power of One is the one people remember, partly because it was first and partly because it arrived at the right moment, when a generation of Australian readers was ready for a big story about a small boy who refuses to stay small.

That reputation can be a burden. Readers who come to it expecting a masterpiece will find the coincidences and the sentimentality hard to forgive. Readers who come to it expecting a yarn will have a good time. The book is best approached as a yarn with ambitions, not as a novel of ideas. It wants to move you, and it usually does, even when you can see the machinery.

What the Book Gets Wrong

The Power of One has been criticized since it was published for being formula fiction, and the criticism is fair. The plot runs on coincidence. The right mentor appears whenever the hero needs one. The villains are grotesques, especially the Judge, who has no interior life beyond cruelty. The women are mostly saints or obstacles. The politics of apartheid are present as weather rather than as a system with beneficiaries, and the novel is more interested in individual triumph than in collective change.

There is also the matter of the "power of one" itself. The phrase sounds inspiring, but the book's version of it is essentially meritocratic: a gifted boy works hard, finds the right coaches, and rises. It does not ask what happens to the children who do not have a Doc or a Geel Piet. It does not ask whether the system that produced the Judge can be reformed by one good boxer. Courtenay is telling a story about survival and self-invention, not a story about justice, and the two are not the same.

The women in the novel get a raw deal. Mary Mandoma is warm and wise and then disappears. Peekay's mother is a nervous invalid who becomes a born-again Christian and a source of embarrassment. Maria, the girl he loves, exists mainly to give him something tender to lose. The book is written from the perspective of a boy who sees women as caretakers or symbols, and while that may be psychologically true to the character, the novel never steps outside that view to give them a life of their own.

The prose can also be clumsy. Courtenay repeats his lessons, sometimes within a few pages. He tells you what a scene means before he lets you feel it. The novel is long, and the middle section in Johannesburg drags. If you are allergic to inspirational fiction, this book will set off every alarm you have.

There is one more problem, and it is the ending. Peekay beats the Judge in a bar fight and carves his initials into the man's arm. It is satisfying in the way that revenge always is, but it is also a fantasy of individual violence solving a problem that the novel has spent hundreds of pages describing as structural. The Judge is not apartheid. He is a bully with a swastika. Beating him does not change the country, and the book does not pretend that it does, but the scene still lets the reader feel as if the account has been settled.

Why It Still Works

And yet. The Power of One has sold millions of copies for a reason. It is a book about a child who is told, in every possible way, that he does not matter, and who decides to matter anyway. That is a fantasy, but it is a durable one. Courtenay writes action well. The boxing scenes are clear and exciting. The prison sequences have real tension. The friendship between the boy and Morrie is funny and warm.

The book is also a portrait of a particular place and time that is hard to find elsewhere in popular fiction. The South Africa of the novel is a world of boarding schools, small towns, mines, and prisons, all organized by race and language. Courtenay does not explain the country to outsiders. He assumes you can keep up. That confidence gives the book texture, even when the politics are underdeveloped.

I would not call The Power of One a great novel. I would call it a great read, the kind of book that makes a long train journey feel short. It is at its best when it forgets to be inspiring and simply shows you a boy in a bad situation learning something useful from an unlikely adult. First with your head, then with your heart. It is a slogan, but it is also a decent way to live.