Ever since he published "Cry, The Beloved Country," a book which so passionately brought to the attention of the outside world the plight of the bitterly exploited native population of South Africa, Alan Paton has come to seem one of the few voices in that somber and menaced country that still speak out for liberal values….

Mr. Paton, to put it mildly, is not a dangerous revolutionary, nor, to put it as simply and respectfully as possible, is he a writer of great originality. He writes as a sensitive liberal, placed in a situation whose ferocious depths plainly alarm him…. The humanity of his work and the limitations of his fiction are clearly marked in "Too Late the Phalarope."

Mr. Paton's subject here is the downfall of a South African hero, Pieter van Vlaanderen, a young police officer of the best Boer stock who represents what is legendary and noblest in South Africa; the book is in large part, I gather, to be taken as an allegory of South Africa today, in relation both to its past and to its cruel unawareness of inner weakness. Mr. Paton has something real to write about, which is why one wishes he had created characters strong enough in every detail to support the burden of meaning he puts on them.

Pieter's father is one of the great landowners, a leader in the Nationalist party and a harsh, somber man who reads nothing but the Bible, despises the English, and rules his wife and family with absolute authority. Pieter himself has a "tragic flaw" in him, to recall the classic formula for the Shakespearean hero; unfortunately, he is so evenly and perfectly split between his strength and weakness that it is hard to take him altogether seriously….

The key to Pieter's isolation is his relation to his father—that is, to the past. The father has always distrusted and scorned in his son a tendency to sit and brood alone….

On the old man's birthday Pieter buys him a book about South African birds. Although old van Vlaanderen never reads anything but the Bible, and is profoundly distrustful of anything in English, he has a passion for the birds of his country; and discovering that the English author of the book has not properly identified a particular bird, the phalarope, he tries in his stiff and clumsy way to win Pieter by going out into the high country with him to show his son what a phalarope really looks like.

They find one, but it is too late, the bird, like the fabulous open country in which they find it, is a symbol of the mythical innocence, freshness and excitement of early South Africa to which Pieter can never return. He has already prepared his downfall, has indulged wistfully his desire for "corruption" by relations with a young native girl….

Under the "Immorality Act" of the country, sexual relations between whites and blacks are a legal offense. Pieter is sent to prison, his father strikes his name from the great family Bible and dies of shame, and the whole family withdraws from the community in horror at Pieter's crime "against the race."…

What is best in this novel … is the atmosphere Mr. Paton conveys of the sultry, brooding tension in South Africa itself…. The whole story prepares one for some terrible catastrophe, some mighty downfall, which seems to point to more than Pieter van Vlaanderen himself. (p. 1)

The book does this for us: it … gives us the local color, the taste and wildness of a new country. But Mr. Paton's characters, and his telling of the story in a too even biblical style, are finally much less satisfactory. Although he can give us an almost hypnotic sense of these people, they are, after all, just types…. Everything in such a story depends on the author's ability to make us believe in the hero's strength far more than in his flaw, which should surprise us; here the catastrophe is hinted at so steadily throughout the book that when it finally comes we are moved, but not enlightened…. (p. 24)

Alfred Kazin, "Downfall of a South African Hero," in The New York Times Book Review (© 1953 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by permission), August 23, 1953, pp. 1, 24.