Bryce Courtenay: Storyteller

The Power of One

Mystery, not logic, is what gives us hope and keeps us believing in a force greater than our own insignificance.

– The Power of One

Bryce Courtenay will always be remembered as the writer who created The Power of One. It was first published on 21 February 1989 by Heinemann in Australia and, soon after, in the United Kingdom, and by Random House in the United States – and it took the world by storm. Its success launched a spectacular literary career that yielded twenty-one bestsellers over twenty-three years.

Bryce had waited his whole life to write this book. He finally sat down to commence it on 8 June 1986, his mother’s eighty-first birthday. While it’s essentially fiction, there can be little doubt that Bryce drew from his own life story to write it. He recalled the day he began writing his first novel in The Silver Moon:

I climbed out of bed early one morning in 1986, headed to my study and began what was to become The Power of One. ‘This is what happened’ seemed a good place to start, and I wrote about what I knew – growing up in South Africa.

Bryce was then aged fifty-two, and had been in the advertising industry for nearly twenty-eight years. Reinventing himself as a fiction writer was to realise a childhood dream, and he had no illusions as to how difficult it might be. He believed he would need to write at least four books before he would be good enough to secure a publisher – he had undertaken some research into bestselling writers and discovered that most of them had not become successful until their fourth book was completed, as he reflected in The Silver Moon:

I gave myself five years in which to write four novels. The first three would be practice books I’d complete in exactly a year each (you have to have a deadline); the fourth novel, the one that would hopefully be published, I’d lavish with attention over a period of two years. Cheeky, I know, but there you go – you have to have a dream.

Bryce was a born storyteller. The people who knew him from childhood all recall that he wanted to become a writer from an early age and was convinced he would become a world-famous one. But starting to write fiction so late in his life meant that Bryce was in a tearing hurry. He already had over a dozen novels in his mind, planned while recovering from his back surgery several years before, and was hungry to move them from his head to the page . . .