TV PRESENTER
The power of the Power Of One has taken even its author by surprise. Neither the rigours of three decades in the advertising game nor a public speaking career has prepared him for the kind of push most authors would give their right arm to hate.
Interview of Bryce Courtenay in 1989
BRYCE COURTENAY
Coming from my sort of background, you know, I just had to cop it. I spent my life in publicity, in a sense, because I'm in advertising, and suddenly to be on the receiving end, it's not as nice as I'd always supposed, but I accept that it has to be done. I mean, books have to be sold like everything else. I think there has to inevitably be a backlash. I mean, here's this so-called glib ad man who's a people persuader and he's done this all his life. Suddenly, he comes along with his left hand, in his spare time writes a novel and sells it for who knows what.
Bryce Courtenay at a radio show
BRYCE COURTENAY
I think the philosophy in the book is very simple. It's about a little guy who has to learn how to win. It's small versus big. It's that business of taking on the world.
JILL HICKSON, Literary Agent
It's simply the best book of this kind that I've ever read.
SUSAN CHENERY, Author and Critic
Ayn Rand meets Huckleberry Finn in South Africa in the 1940s.
WOMAN
I mean, inevitably, the money and all the other sort of glamorous aspects have run away with us a bit.
BRYCE COURTENAY
You sit there and you notice this huge piece of machinery beginning to roll all over the world. And you think, 'What if they were wrong? What if everybody got it wrong?'
JENNIFER BYRNE
1930s Africa, the coming-of-age story of a young Anglo-African boy called Peekay, written by the recently deceased Bryce Courtenay. So why, Michael, do you think that — because it's so not Australian, this book — that Australians have embraced this as their own?
MICHAEL WILLIAMS
That's a really good question. It's nice to see it on the list in so far as that footage up the front of the trolleys full of copies of this book… I mean, it has sold by the trolley-load for many, many years now and so…
JENNIFER BYRNE
I can't remember if it's 6.7 million copies or 7.6 million.
MICHAEL WILLIAMS
That is an unseemly number.
JENNIFER BYRNE
It's… It's a lot.
MICHAEL WILLIAMS
That is an unseemly number. But it nice because often we're anxious about claiming things as Australian titles, and this is… you know, there's nothing in this that's manifestly Australian one way or the other. It's… maybe it's just our habit of liking to embrace success. Successful South African is an Australian. Successful New Zealander as an Australian. We're happy because it's done well and we want to embrace it.
JASON STEGER
What about… Peekay is a battler. He is a real battler, from the moment we meet him at the age of five, he's… under pressure to survive. And… Australians love battlers, don't they? And Peekay is a battler throughout the whole book.
JENNIFER BYRNE
That's an interesting conception.
JUDY NUNN
No, he's not. He becomes a messiah.
JASON STEGER
Well…
JENNIFER BYRNE
But he battled to become a messiah!
MARIEKE HARDY
But he's very modest about it.
JUDY NUNN
Well… I was engaged in the book when I first picked it up and the early, the five-year-old, all this stuff in the orphanage and the young battler, and I particularly loved Chook.
JENNIFER BYRNE
Explain Chook. Explain Chook.
JUDY NUNN
Yeah, Chook is a pet chicken, you know, that Peekay has, and I love Chook and Chook dies… I'm not sure, about there somewhere, I think I've vaguely got it. After that, the book lost me.
JASON STEGER
That was the end of the book for you?
JUDY NUNN
It did, the death of Chook, because after that, Peekay just became… ..too incredibly, unbelievably heroic in everything he did. Everything he did was… magnificent and stupendous and I didn't believe it! I thought, 'This person doesn't exist!'
MARIEKE HARDY
But do you know what I love? I hated the book, I think it's a terrible book. I think it's a cloyingly sentimental book. At every turn, someone's…
JUDY NUNN
It's not believable!
MARIEKE HARDY
..looking out a window and giving wisdom. What I love about it is that… The basic check-in points are Bryce Courtenay's life. He did grow up in an orphanage, he did attend private school, he did get into boxing… This is sort of, in part way, his life. But then he's completely enhanced — this amazing, fantastical part. You have to have balls of steel to do that.
JENNIFER BYRNE
He had balls of steel.
MARIEKE HARDY
Essentially, he's reimagined his childhood with thousands of South Africans standing around going, 'Bryce! Bryce! Bryce!'
JUDY NUNN
Absolutely.
MARIEKE HARDY
And I just think, 'Well, good for you! I mean, why not rewrite your life in fiction and make yourself just a pretty great person who everyone…'
JASON STEGER
But he's not the first person to have done it.
JENNIFER BYRNE
A lot of people call it real-life memoir. He calls it a novel, which is what it is.
MARIEKE HARDY
I think there's something quite ridiculously admirable about it. It's so stupid!
JASON STEGER
Bryce said that some of his other books were closer to his own life, like White Thorn, he said was closer to his own life.
JENNIFER BYRNE
I never heard Bryce say, flat, 'This is my story.' You're right, though.
MARIEKE HARDY
But he doesn't have to!
JENNIFER BYRNE
He doesn't need to. It's all…
MARIEKE HARDY
If as a salesperson, you're sending an author out on a tour, he grew up in South Africa, he did go to an orphanage, he did go to private school, he did box — you go, 'Ooh, then it must be about him!' You let the audience fill in the gaps which everyone did and adored him for it. Very much so. It was so much about the marketing.
MICHAEL WILLIAMS
But the other thing it was about was storytelling. I mean, the Bryce Courtenay machine was about telling a story and telling a story that hit all the buttons that people responded to, and the heroes and villains and everything writ large. The man produced 600 pages every six months! It was this extraordinary output, and he knew exactly what his readers wanted and he gave it to them.