Legends and secrets

I wrote about one of the books I read during my trip to Australia, a history of an Irish family that emigrated to Australia and settled in western Queensland and later in the Kimberley. I had also mentioned a boring book for the return flight.

There were a couple more books I read during the trip. I began the first on the outbound flights, so hadn’t had a chance to buy any Australian books. This was the novel The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay. The book was appropriate for the trip anyway – though the story is set in South Africa, where Courtenay grew up, he later moved to Australia.

South Africa was colonized by two groups, one group was the Dutch and Germans, known as Boer or Afrikaans, and the other was the English. Both groups treated the natives in the ways colonizers have always treated natives. But the two white groups also battled each other (such as during the Boer War), with the English ending up ahead. At the time of the story South Africa isn’t a colony, but is controlled by white people.

The story begins with our narrator, Peekay, who is English, going to a boarding school at age 5. He is sent because his mother is ill. At the school he is mercilessly abused by the German students. In 1939 they claim that Hitler will soon come to South Africa and liberate the Germans and march the English into the sea.

Family situations change and Peekay, still quite young, is reunited with his family. On the two-day train trip he meets a boxing champion and watches a match. He sees a way to deal with future bullies. At the new house he befriended a German professor. This town is predominantly English, so Doc, as the professor is called, is imprisoned (America did the same to the Japanese). Peekay visits Doc in prison every day and begins boxing lessons that the prison staff holds for area boys.

Because Doc and Peekay treat the black prisoners as real people (and Peekay becomes adept at smuggling stuff into and out of the prison) the black people begin to see the two as deliverers of sorts. This intensifies when Peekay begins winning his fights. He gets a strong black following and is called their Tadpole Angel.

Peekay goes off to an English boarding school for what we consider the high school years. He keeps the Tadpole Angel legend going. Since he doesn’t get into Oxford on scholarship he takes a year to work in a mine in a very dangerous job. At the end of his time there he encounters his chief tormentor from when he was 5. The book ends with that encounter.

Towards the end of the book, Peekay began to annoy me. During that original abuse he way too perceptive for a five-year-old. And after that he excelled at everything he did. He seems to magically escape disaster at the mine. I also thought the book ended too soon. I wondered what Peekay would do with the legend of the Tadpole Angel. How would he help the black people who held him in such high regard? Other than that it was a pretty decent read and offered insight into South Africa before Apartheid became official law.

The other book was the novel In My Father’s House by Jane Mundy. The story is about Beth, who moved into her father’s house in Sydney to care for him during his final illness. Now that he is gone she has to deal with all his stuff as well as her own stuff she brought when she moved in. One guess why this story appealed to me. So Beth hires a clutter buster to help her cope.

As various items are uncovered we get the history of Beth, her brother, and her parents. We also get the history of Martha, the clutter buster, and her son Tom. For several years Beth dated Jake, who was quite active in the Australian peace movement, protesting Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war. Jake and Beth’s father don’t get along because her father was prevented from serving in WWII. He thinks Jake is a coward. Beth concludes Jake is the bravest man she has ever met.

Of course, various secrets are revealed as Beth reaches the end of her decluttering work (and does it in a much shorter span of time than I would have thought). Overall, an enjoyable story.