Paton's second novel, Too Late the Phalarope, is similar in certain respects to Cry, the Beloved Country, but, for the most part, the novels differ strikingly. But works have similarities of style and dramatic method, and each relates a comparatively simple story. Too Late the Phalarope tells the story of Pieter van Vlaanderen, a young police lieutenant decorated in war and also nationally famous as a football player. He is a married man with two children, highly respected in the rural Afrikaner community and, indeed, the kind of man in whose presence other men feel constrained to subdue loud talk or off-color jokes. Yet Pieter van Vlaanderen transgresses the strict prohibitions of the South African Immorality Act which forbids sexual relations between members of...