"I have been a teacher all my life", says the now septuagenarian Alan Paton in his absorbing Towards the Mountain….

However, if after … much discouragement in confronting some of the most disturbing problems of our century—racism, nationalism, violence—this indefatigable man is still trying to teach us something, he has chosen the most engaging way of doing it. The account of his youth and early career as a science master, husband and lover against the background of the subtropical beauty of Natal, and his later career as a reformer of a reformatory for black delinquents outside Johannesburg, makes compelling reading, and culminates in the final excitement of Paton's feverishly composing a best-seller while visiting penal institutions in Europe and America from Borstal to Alcatraz. He writes in a rigorously unmannered prose, lightened by gentle irony, sometimes breaking into comedy—to my mind this is his best writing yet.

He also presents his readers with a more rounded, interesting and entertaining character than he has succeeded in giving us in any previous novel, short story, play or biography. His honesty stops just this side of being obsessive—if he refrains from boring us with the whole truth, at least one feels he is telling nothing but the truth, without evasion.