At his birthday party in a small town of the southern Transvaal, the aged patriarch of a prominent family is given a book, The Birds of South Africa, by his adult son. It would be innocuous were we not aware of the risk the son is taking one hundred pages into Alan Paton’s Too Late the Phalarope. Who would dare to give a book to the austere and forbidding Jakob van Vlaanderen, who “read only the One, and the newspapers”? Still worse, the author of this book bears an English, not a Dutch, surname. And the son, Pieter, though himself a strong, imposing man, is also gentle and sensitive and has, since his boyhood, carried heart wounds from his father. He is taking a risk here, but it succeeds. A bird-lover, Jakob is entranced by the book. Later, he is additionally delighted to find in it a mistake, when the writer describes phalaropes as coastal birds; they can, Jakob claims, be found far from the ocean. He proposes the family make a day trip to the country so that he can prove “[t]hat Englishman of yours” wrong. They do so, and the tears well up in Pieter’s eyes as his father stands behind him, guiding his gaze toward the fleeting bird. Had the tender moment occurred a decade or even a year earlier, it might have been their salvation. But Pieter’s fall has already begun.
Almost four decades after his death, in 1988, Alan Paton is still remembered for his long-standing and tenacious opposition to apartheid and for his first novel, Cry, the Beloved Country. Published to immediate acclaim and commercial success in 1948, the year the newly elected Malan government passed apartheid into law, Cry, the Beloved Country has been adapted into two films and a musical. In 2003, it was graced with the imprimatur of Oprah’s Book Club. Paton was in his forties when he wrote it during an extended tour of European and North American penal institutions. In the years following its publication, the one-time reformatory principal became an internationally respected spokesman for the anti-apartheid movement and a founding president of the short-lived Liberal Party. In 1953, when Paton’s star was rising, and when the National Party’s hold on the country may well have seemed unbreakable, he wrote Too Late the Phalarope. Though a critical success at the time and still in print, it faded from the consciousness of the reading public. It is, in fact, a neglected masterpiece.
The novel’s sharp contrast with Cry, the Beloved Country surely accounts for much of that neglect. While both books explore the racial injustice in Paton’s country, the early novel does so with soaring lyricism. It tells the story of two grieving fathers but also indicates where they might find a measure of healing. In Too Late the Phalarope, Paton’s lyricism obtains, but the melody is subdued and sometimes severe—we are told, from the opening lines, that this will be the story of a family’s destruction. He has, moreover, set himself a harder task. Cry, the Beloved Country, narrated largely from the perspective of a Zulu Anglican priest, focuses on the victims of injustice. The latter book takes us inside the world of a provincial Afrikaner family, the sort of people whose blood-and-soil commitment to their heritage, language, and traditions gave birth to the apartheid system and, most potently for this story, the 1927 Immorality Act, which criminalized sexual relations between the races. For the downfall of the Van Vlaanderen family comes when Pieter—a police lieutenant and hero of both the Second World War and the rugby field—is discovered to have repeatedly slept with a young black woman named Stephanie, making him a criminal and the whole of his family outcasts to the Afrikaner world.