GREENE, Graham: The Quiet American (1955)

I finaly got around ‘rereading’ The Quiet American by listening to Simon Cadell’s very nice naration on Audible. It is impossible today, to read Graham Greene’s novel without seeing it as an indictment of the U.S. war in Iraq in 2003 and any involvement of a western nation in a part of the world it doesn’t know or understand where there is no direct relation to the western countries’ national interests.

Try to ‘objectivate’ today’s reading by first rereading an original book review such as the NY Times Book review of March 1956.

More interesting reading – and another book in my library I have to reread – and basically an apology to Greene’s The Quiet American is William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick’s The Ugly American published in 1958. Need to be convinced read ‘Still Ugly After All These Years’ an essay on the book by Michael Meyer in the NY Times, July 2009.

More on the Genius of Graham Greene: read Zadie Smith’s Shades of Greene, in The Guardian, September 2004.

More on the Vietnam War: watch the THE VIETNAM WAR a ten-part, 18-hour documentary film series directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick featuring testimony from nearly 80 witnesses, including many Americans who fought in the war and others who opposed it, as well as Vietnamese combatants and civilians from both the winning and losing sides. (http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-vietnam-war/home/)

Courtenay, Bryce | 1989 | The Power of One |

The Power of One was Bryce Courtenay’s first book. It was published in 1989 and I read it even before it became a bestseller. I was very happy to rediscover it today as an audio book very nicely read by Humphrey Bower.

Summary – Attention! Spoilers!

It is the year 1939 in South Africa. Peekay is five years old and lives on a farm with his mother and beloved Zulu nanny, Mary Mandoma. After his mother has a nervous breakdown, he is sent away to a boarding school. There, Peekay is bullied mercilessly by the other students because he is English, while the other children are Afrikaans. They nickname him Piskop, meaning “piss-head.” The ringleader of the bullies is a particularly mean-spirited boy named Judge who has a tattoo of a swastika on his arm. He tells Peekay that Hitler will march the English out to sea when he comes to South Africa.

The bullying and abuse that Peekay suffers while at school cause him to start wetting his bed. When he returns home from school at the end of his first year, he asks his nanny to help cure him of his bedwetting problem. She summons a medicine man, who cures Peekay and gives him a magic chicken. The medicine man also teaches Peekay a new way to draw on his inner strength called “the power of one” and tells him that he can always find the medicine man by some waterfalls and stepping stones in a special place in his head.

Peekay takes his chicken and newfound strength back to school with him. However, the new school year is even worse than the previous one as Judge continues to bully him. At the end of the year, Judge forces Peekay to eat feces and kills his chicken. Peekay is looking forward to going back home to his nanny, but is told to take the train to his grandfather’s home in Barberton instead. On the train, he meets HoppieGroenwald, a boxer who inspires him to become the world welterweight boxing champion, even though he has never boxed in his life.

When Peekay gets to Barberton, his mother tells him that she converted to a born-again Christian after leaving the mental institution and that she sent Peekay’s nanny away because she refused to convert. Peekay is annoyed at this turn of events. In the hills behind his grandfather’s home, he meets a German professor named Doc who collects cactuses and gives Peekay piano lessons. When World War II begins, Doc is arrested and sent to prison for being an unregistered alien. Peekay visits him in the jail every day to continue his lessons.

While at the prison, Peekay trains with the prison boxing squad. An old prisoner named Geel Piet teaches him to box. Geel is half white and half black, which causes others to call him “yellow.” After training with Geel, Peekay helps the team win several boxing matches. He becomes very close to Geel, and starts a prison letter writing service and tobacco smuggling service to help him. This makes Peekay very popular with the prisoners, who nickname him the Tadpole Angel. However, the prison guards eventually begin to suspect illicit activity in the jail, and one of them beats Geel to death in the gym when he refuses to reveal who is responsible for bringing him the letters that he was caught carrying.

Peekay eventually becomes the best under-twelve boxer in his region, as well as a highly talented classical pianist. After Doc is released from prison at the end of the war, he and a local librarian and schoolteacher work together to tutor Peekay in academic subjects such as literature and science. As a result, Peekay wins a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school in Johannesburg. He joins the school boxing team with his new friend, Morrie, as his manager and helps lead the team to victory for the first time. He also begins training with Solly Goldman, a professional boxing coach.

In one of his boxing matches, he faces a black man Gideon Mandoma, whom he later discovers is the son of his former nanny. He defeats the much more experienced Gideon in a hard-fought match. Peekay is inspired by Gideon to start an after-school program to teach him and other black teenagers to read and write English. However, the local police come to shut down the school because the black students must be home by their curfew time under the new apartheid regime. Undaunted, the boys turn the program into a correspondence school and continue learning through letters.

When his last year in school arrives, Peekay tries and fails to obtain a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University in England. Concerned by the setback, Peekay decides to get a job as a miner to earn money for college. While working in the copper mines in northern Rhodesia, he befriends an old man named Rasputin, who names Peekay as a beneficiary in his life insurance policy. When Rasputin dies, Peekay receives sufficient funds to pay for Oxford. Just as he is about to leave for college, Peekay runs into Judge, his old enemy from boarding school, at a bar. Judge is in a rage and tries to kill him. However, Peekay uses his boxing skills to defeat Judge, and carves his initials and the English flag over his swastika tattoo. (Source: SuperSummary)