In terms of tragedy as the rest of the world knows it, there is a tragedy in Alan Paton's Too Late the Phalarope—the private tragedy of a man of fine instincts in conflict with an instinct that seems misplaced from some earlier, brutish existence. The writer takes care to endow his hero with noble attributes and virtues, and provides that he shall bring about his own downfall, thus fulfilling the classical conditions of tragedy….

Peter van Vlaanderen is a Greek-godlike young man with [a fatal] flaw. It takes the form of lust, a terrible hunger of lust that, it is suggested (and as modern readers we require this sort of psychological explanation, though the Greeks would not have bothered), has grown out of all proportion to the rest of van Vlaanderen's nature through his father's stern suppression of the son's affectionate needs as a child…. Peter van Vlaanderen's lust takes as its object, as that of many men has done before him, an out-of-work servant girl. But she is black. The colour problem makes of this lust of van Vlaanderen's something hideous and unnatural, rather than an unfortunate venture into infidelity on the part of a strictly-brought-up young man. In terms of a morality outside South Africa, what he does would involve him in a private struggle, a private hurt and unhappiness between him and the wife whom he loves, and some social disapproval; but within the South African morality what he has done is dragged down the scale of sin to match the evilness of Humbert Humbert's relations with Lolita. (p. 521)

In the end, van Vlaanderen's relations with the girl are discovered, and he is undone; and all the consequences of tragedy fall upon him. But the morality of the novel—the morality of South Africa—claims tragedy on the wrong count. The thunderbolt misses; the explosion, like the moral truth, is off-centre. For lust can be a tragedy for a man, but it is not a national disaster….

In Too Late the Phalarope there are two voices that speak outside the accepted morality of the book and they are not detached at all. The police captain who arrests van Vlaanderen says: "I know of an offence against the law, and, as a Christian, I know an offence against God; but I do not know an offence against the race." And when all normal ties of love and affection prove less strong than shame, and Peter van Vlaanderen's father closes his door to his son, and his wife is sent away back to her parents, the old aunt who has narrated part of the book says: "The truth is that we are not as other people any more." (p. 522)