WARNING: It is extremely likely that this blog will degenerate to incoherent ranting by the end for reasons that will become apparent.

Our latest book club read was The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay. I know a couple of people who cite this as their favourite book of all time, and combined with the naked man featured on the cover, I was intrigued. I think that this book generated the most discussion yet in that there were disputes over the underlying motives of some characters, etc. I would say that while I enjoyed this book overall, I also had some major problems with it.

I was really enjoying the book at the beginning but slowly started getting more and more frustrated. So much shit happens to this poor kid that it just starts to become almost too much. I stated thinking "For Christ sake, will someone please just give this kid a sucker?". Fortunatley, someone does. But this heralds the beginning of the "too perfect" portion of the book. Peekay is brilliant, athletic and can do no wrong. But what bothered me the most may be due to my own flaws and short comings. It seemed like all the lessons he learned were by things that happened around him or to him, not through things that he did himself. For example, the major theme of the book is his disdain for racism and his emergence as the Tadpole Angel - chief of all tribes. But he learned this hate for racism from watching and never partaking. Isn't it likely that at some point in his life he would have succumbed to peer pressure and used a racial slur or put someone down? And perhaps his regret of this moment would help to shape his future opinions? How likely is it that in an environment like 1930s South Africa, a kid would never falter in his views? While I was pondering this I was remebering one of my own experiences. In middle school everyone picked on this one obese girl. Since everyone else was doing it, I got pressured in to joining in and eventually shouted "Tremor!" as she walked by and mimiced the ground shaking beneath her feet. I immediately felt awful. Ever since then I've been painfully aware that you choose how you treat people. Does everyone have an experience like this or am I composed of particularly weak moral character? It seemed that an incident like this would have made Peekay's morality more believable for me.

We also hotly debated the character of Geel Piet - a black prisoner who acts as Peekay's first boxing coach. My impression of Geel was that while he was fond of Peekay, he was a product of the prison system. He had never learned to trust and in turn was not trustworthy. The prison had taught him to always leave your true self hidden. As I was reading, there were a couple phrases that made me think Peekay saw this too, and that his observation of this was one of the lessons he learned. The idea that people are shaped by their environment and how they're treated. But some of the girls in the book club didn't see it this way at all. I guess that's the beauty of books - different people get different things out of the books.

Now here comes the ranting. While I admit that this wasn't my favourite book ever, i have developed a relationship with it over the last couple weeks and respect the story for what it is. Perhaps this is the reason that I felt so personally offended when we rented the 1992 movie version of the Power of One. I understand that it is sometimes not possible to fit every phrase and event of a book into a movie, but should one not at least attempt to maintain the spirit of the book?! They even changed what the "power of one" is! They completely eliminated the character that singly handedly provided Peekay with both his single obsessive ambition as well as his lifelong personal mantra - "First with the head, then with the heart." Then, and this is the truly horrible part, then they added a love interest and killed her off to fuel Peekay's motivation (and also some war/fight that didn't make any sense....I dunno I was not paying attention and fairly far down the road to drunk at this point)! That absolutely ruins the point of what Peekay was all about. So singular was his goal to be boxing champion that he never would have let a girl get in the way (he sees her while he's boxing, which results in his knock down - stupidity!). His lifelong nemesis is a guy named "the Judge" who tortures Peekay as a child and the culmination of this occurs in the final pages of the book when Peekay meets him again. No mention of this in the movie. In fact, the torturing at the hands of the Judge seems inconsequential, especially when you consider that it was the major driving force behind the rest of his life. The move barely takes the time to establish relationships so you never understand why the death of Granpa Chook or Geel Piet would even be significant and I didn't even notice if they bothered to kill off Doc!

What is the point of making a book into a movie if you so severely alter the spirit of it, that it becomes almost unrecognizable?! Did they even read the book? Lesson learned though, renting the movie is NOT the same as reading the book ;)