Much has been published recently about the decline of tragedy, and the question has been asked whether tragedy can be written in this age. Offstage, during the discussion, Alan Paton went ahead and did it—in terms of the novel—in Too Late the Phalarope. It was the book that followed his much-acclaimed first novel, Cry, the Beloved Country. It offered him, therefore, all the notorious "second book" challenges, as well as the problems of tragedy. The two books are an interesting study in the tragic—and an element beyond. (p. 83)

The core of Too Late the Phalarope is classically simple: Pieter van Vlaanderen, a police lieutenant, honored in the community, breaks the iron law of the South African Immorality Act. Thereby he is destroyed and his family with him. A secret flaw has brought about the fall of a man of stature. He comprehends what has happened, and recognizes his own responsibility in it. Nevertheless, the story contains forces that become cumulative inevitabilities, helping to thrust him on an inexorable path. As in Cry, the Beloved Country, we are given a balanced picture of environmental influences coexistent with personal responsibility.

Four major factors—two of which are social and two, personal—produce the tragedy. The first of these is the psychotic rigidity of the Afrikaner community in South Africa. An illicit sexual encounter might cause varying degrees of trouble in marriage, family, and community anywhere. But it is not sex that destroys Pieter—it is race…. His name is destroyed irreparably and all who bear his name are consumed in the shame of it.

The second social element is puritanism, in the community and in Pieter's father, Jacob van Vlaanderen. The puritanism of the community, of course, has theological and historical roots that predate the race psychosis. But there has been a natural, inevitable absorption of the one strain into the other, so that they have become indissoluble and mutually reinforcing. Thus a deep emotional disturbance has been given the sanction of morality and the prejudice of man translated into the law of God.

It is such men as Jacob van Vlaanderen who make up the Afrikaner community, and it is partly the community that has formed Jacob van Vlaanderen, putting its own stamp upon those elements of character that are uniquely his. He is a good man in the letter of the law and of puritan moral codes, but praise of him, if such it be, must stop there. He is as hard and merciless a judge of men as any who ever walked in the line of Calvin and Knox in colonial America or puritan England.

The unyielding will and emotional insensitivity of Jacob are the root of the first of the personal disorders that prepare the long way for Pieter's fall: a deep hostility between father and son. (pp. 83-5)

Tante Sophie, who frankly calls herself a "watcher," tells the tale in a generally direct way, though the limits of knowledge in first-person narration are occasionally strained…. In recurring passages of high rhapsodic tone—definitely conventionalized—she functions as chorus. It is both effective and slightly overdone. In the classic tragic manner, she reiterates the already accomplished doom, so that the suspense, which is great, is not the suspense of "whether" but the greater one of "how." (pp. 85-6)

The fourth of the major destructive factors is the tension between Pieter and his wife, Nella. She is of a gentle and timorous nature, loving her husband but unable to venture into the depths of his mind and spirit where his dangerous conflicts rage. Also there is an inhibition upon their sexual life. Puritanism has conditioned Nella to believe in a sharp division between the bodily passions and the other elements of love, which in her eyes are essentially "higher." She gives herself and then withdraws. Pieter longs for a sustained sexual harmony with her, based on an acceptance of the unity of all aspects of love. Failure to achieve this does contribute to Pieter's swartgalligheid, the deadly black mood…. (pp. 86-7)

The obsessive drive that carries Pieter to the secretly-smiling black girl, Stephanie, takes its rise from a constellation of factors which I would not presume to analyze clinically. Paton has captured the agony of obsession powerfully. But sex surely is more the operational means than the aim of it. A game of symbol-hunting might be played with the image of the bird and the name of the bird that is the occasion of a fleeting communication between this father and son. On the face of it, however, Paton, by his emphasis, has given this relationship the crucial place. He suggests that if some bond of emotion and interest had really united these two, in Pieter's boyhood, the tragedy would not have happened. (pp. 87-8)

A bitter, buried core of hostility is the explosive charge in Pieter. It takes its shattering force from the thick, hard casing of the social environment which provides the containing pressure that makes all great explosions. The immediate fuse is the sexual strain with Nella. (p. 88)

If it were simply consuming sexual hunger driving Pieter he could and would have found means to appease it, secretly and safely, within his own race. But "the thing that he hates," this "something that could bring no joy," is not only sexual, with the piquancy of a primitive, raw lust, it is also destruction and revenge. This is the one sure and deadly blow against his father, against Nella and his children, against Tante Sophie, and against the Afrikaner community. To this should be added—and against himself. These are his hates. He does not comprehend them; his real motivation is well below the level of his consciousness. He does not understand that he loves and hates at the same time. (p. 89)

Pieter cannot reach [Nella] in complete unity…. But that is not a total impasse and is not enough to drive him to the black girl. The basic trouble is, he cannot communicate his whole nature to Nella as he desperately needs to do. For expressing and exploring his rebellion against the communal code, her softness is as impermeable as his father's hardness. (p. 90)

Inevitably, comparisons with The Scarlet Letter and Crime and Punishment arise. Once Pieter has committed his act, there is no possible release for him but total exposure—a dilemma he shares in part with Arthur Dimmesdale and Raskolnikov. Paton gives us a long sequence of superb suspense, arising out of guilty misunderstandings of innocent natural coincidences. But just as the death wish is commonly unconscious, so Pieter suffers an agonized dread of discovery, unconscious of the fact that it is that exposure and its consequences that have motivated him from the start.

This, it seems to me, is what Paton has wrought intuitively. It is not made wholly clear to any of the persons in [Too Late the Phalarope] and it is not possible to say how far it was present in Paton's conscious intention, but it is at least intuitively unerring in all the elements as presented. (p. 92)