SOURCE: Wade, Jean-Philippe. “Radical Democracy and Literary Form: Alan Paton's Ah, But Your Land is Beautiful.” English in Africa 28, no. 1 (May 2001): 91-103.

In the following essay, Wade contrasts Alan Paton's first two novels, Cry, the Beloved Country and Too Late the Phalarope, with his last novel, Ah, But Your Land Is Beautiful.

J. M. Coetzee's critique (1974/1992) of Alan Paton's ‘Jim Comes to Jo'burg’ novel Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) briefly argued that it was a form of “religious tragedy” which, by suggesting that “the dispensation under which man suffers is unshakable” (348), was disablingly “apolitical or quietistic” (347). This line of argument was developed in an article by Stephen Watson (1982) who demonstrated how the novel, by de-politicising the law and “man-made reality and historical conditions” (33) through representing them as fatal-istically beyond human intervention and thus “ultimately inexplicable” (32), produced a “mood of unquestioning awe and respect” (32) for them.

Watson briefly extended his...