SOURCE: "A Study of Alan Paton's Too Late the Phalarope," in Durham University Journal, Vol. LXXVI, No. 2, June, 1984, pp. 249-54.

Below, Watts discusses the classical, epic, psychological, and religious dimensions of Too Late the Phalarope.

The role of the White South African novelist is often assumed by outsiders to be primarily that of keeper of the national conscience. We may be surprised at the number of important writers—André Brink, Athol Fugard, Nadine Gordimer, Alan Paton and Laurens van der Post come quickly to mind—who have been nurtured in that beautiful and troubled land, but we expect their work to be, as it often is, a vehicle for social protest: fiction is one doorway to truth not yet quite closed in the blank wall of censorship.

Alan Paton's best known novel, the unforgettably compassionate Cry, the Beloved Country, is such a book. Published in 1948, its protest at...