This book is a must read on everyones list, I am only sorry that it is out of print.

I truly loved this book. Bryces family and the suffering that his son, Damon, went through nearly broke my heart and it was vividly written with plenty of emotion.

On the downside, the book was at least 30 pages too long. There were unnessecary parts, such as going on about the lighthouse light in the apartmenmt window and Damons junk-bucket car that really got to me because they were repeated and dragged out too much for my liking. Also, the graphic descriptions of Damons injuries and infections are not really something good to read with you lunch.

Also, I found the book to be a little bit overrated.

I dont consider it a masterpiece like "The Power of One" but its definitely not a cold fish like Courtenays "The Potato Factory," which bored me to tears. Id rate it at about a 7.5/10 or 8/10, putting it in the same league as "Tandia."

For those not up on BC, a short history - BC was under a deadline to produce TANDIA (the "Power of One" sequel), and many fans were lukewarm about Tandia - well, it was because everything you read in April Fools day was going on while he had to finish it!

Back to this novel - it is a must-read for anyone with a curiosity about what a family goes through in the face of tragedy, and one that doesnt mind LIVING through the REAL life drama and frustration of a father and mother doing EVERYTHING they can to save their son dying of a disease. It got this grown man some major lumps in my throat, fists on the table, and some tears here and there - I cannot say that about anything I have ever read before in my life. Bryce really puts all his heart and soul to make you, the reader, feel his anger, pain, helplessness and sorrow about someone you will never know. This is a major literary achievement for one of the most brilliant authors of our time.

As I have said in some of my other BC reviews - it is a shame that he does not get more exposure in the US. My wife and I have read everything he has ever done, and not 1 page is a dud amongst the thousands he has written - and we can name thousands of duds out there right now on your supermarket shelves...

The young salesgirl from whom I purchased my copy some weeks ago tried to sell me a jumbo box of tissues to go with it...
"Youll need them..." she advised, and I suppose I did, but somehow the sheer length of Damons journey fom death to birth- and back again to death is so incredibly gruelling that the reader is left as numb and drained as were his parents and his devoted parner, Celeste.

"A Modern Love Story" is the books subtitle, and there is no accident to the nonsubtle cynicism of this description...for this is an ANGRY book, a book that rages, not just against the genetic tragedy that bypassed Benita Courtenays first two sons to claim Damon- but it is also an anguished, embittered railing aginst the bureaucraticc bunglings, mismanagement, highhandedness and incompetencies that led to his death at such an early age.
For Damon Courtenay, born a haemophiliac, died of Aids....transfusion- induced Aids....Aids introduced by transfusions of blood products accepted from donor groups long decreed unacceptable in other countries, using a technique acknowledged to be less safe than other proven, more costly methods. In Australia, at that time, under the Equal Opportunity provisions, EVERYONE had the right to give blood...and a Health Minister defended that right, even though the mechanics of Aids transmission were already becoming widely known.
But before the Aids, there was the haemophilia.......

..."...Haemophilia is as extraordinarily painful and protracted disease. A bleed is usually treated eight or ten hours after it has started, for it takes this long for a knock to become more painful thatn the initial bump. People bump themselves around sixty times a day and so it is impossible to notice a bump and transfuse it immediately. You have to wait and see if an ordinary, casual bump has caused internal bleeding. But once a bleed starts, the pain continues long after the blood transfusion has been given. The clotting component, Factor V111, takes at least seven hours to stop continuous bleeding and often as long as a couple of days. This means that internal blood, seeping out of thousands of capillaries, builds up pressure under the skin. Unable to break the skin, the blood soon has nowhere to go and pushes inwards. The result is not dissimilar to being squeezed tighter and tighter by a vice. Imagine your hand, arm or knee in a vice which is squeezed relentlessly for eight or ten hours. The pain would become unbearable..."

The disruption to normal family life seems almost unbelievable. Damons haemophilia was to cost him two days in every week of his school life, and he was to receive, during his life, at least three blood transfusions a week and sometimes more, usually late at night.
In the early days, it was Bryce Courtenays job to get Damon to hospital and stay with him while the missing Factor V111was transfused to allow his blood to begin clotting, usually a three hour round trip that took over the sleep patterns of both. Later, much later, after a bittler political struggle, ended only by the direct intervention of new Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, Haemophilics and their families earned the right to store blood products at home and self-transfuse....a right sufferers in other countriues had been granted long before.....a quality-of-life enhancer long and bitterly opposed by Australias didactic medical profession.
That there is no love lost between Bryce Courtenay and the Australian medical profession in general is made very clear from Chapter 1. In fact, this whole book is a shouted objection, a bitter railing against fate, circumstance and bureaucracy, so vehement that it leaves the reader, too, quite battleweary. Nor is Damons dying sentimentally or aesthetically sanitised for us. Aids is an ugly death, and Damons is uglier than most...a drawn-out enduring to exhaust both subject and subjected until there is no beauty left in that lingering life.

Damon had intended, Bryce assures us, to write his own story, feeling that the real facts of aids need to be made clear to a misinformed world. Lacking the time, and it would seem, the skill, Damons last request was for his father to `please write my book and his father did, indeed, bury himself in this task as a grief-assuaging therapy before the rawness of that suffering, and the fury, had in any way abated..
So this is an angry book......anger at a young life expended, anger at things managed and mismanaged, anger at perceived shortcomings and weaknesses. And there is also the rawness of inevitable guilt, for do we not all see, when it is too late, how much better we might all have behaved...how DIFFERENTLY we could have performed?

Had I been Bryce Courtenays editor, I would have suggested, I think, that he set this writing task aside for a spell....to take time to reflect and heal before diving headlong into this vitriolic saga.....but then this would not have been, truly, Damons story,warts and all, would it?
Robin Knight