When Alan Paton published "Cry, the Beloved Country" thirteen years ago, he called it a "story of comfort in desolation." There is small comfort in [George Washington September, Sir!], the present novel about apartheid. The desolation of the urbanized South African natives appears to have grown with their growing loss of naïveté; lasting degradation has only served to sharpen sensitivity. Nor has the wretchedness of their status blunted the urgency of their human needs. This, at least, is the picture that emerges from Ronald Harwood's book, his first novel….

Mr. Harwood, who shows himself a very skillful writer, does justice to the complexity, as well as the honesty, of his engaging hero. If one considers the limitations of George's idiom, the powerful pertinence of his account is nothing short of amazing. And so is its sustained suspense. Not until well along in the narrative does one realize...