In Paton's novels one hears voices. That is his method. It derives perhaps—fascinatingly—from the secret level at which the suprarational of creative imagination and the suprarational of religious belief well up together in him. In Phalarope a voice bore witness to the undoing of a young man by racist laws that made a criminal act out of a passing sexual infidelity. A loving relative watched what she was powerless to prevent; hers was the voice of compassion. In Ah, But Your Land is Beautiful, watcher has turned spy. Characters' actions are seen now by hostile, distorting eyes and recorded in the evil cadences of poison pen letters. Paton's technique remains the same, but his viewpoint has changed from sorrowful compassion to irony. Compare the hushed shock with which Paton described Pieter van Vlaanderen's "fall" (he has made love to a black girl) from the love of wife and family, honor, and self-respect in Phalarope, with the prurient cackle of Proud White Christian Woman….

The phalarope, rare bird of understanding that came too late between father and son in the earlier novel, is recognized between the generations in the proud acceptance by the wealthy Indian family, the Bodasinghs, of their daughter's involvement in the Defiance Campaign against unjust laws. And, much later in the narrative, the bird figures again in the rise of internal moral conflicts and their liberal resolution within formerly self-righteous racists…. This type of happy-end conversion is sometimes difficult to believe and slightly embarrassing to read. Perhaps it is best taken as another symbol: that of Alan Paton the man's continued faith in the power of seeing the light, which is in tension with the writer's ironic doubt that its beam goes all the way to a change in power structure. Proud White Christian Woman's "conversion," on the other hand, is brought about by brutal circumstance that, alas, seems closer to the actualities of change in South Africa: the threat of her own death. She is dying of cancer, as there are signs that white society is beginning to know it can die of apartheid. (p. 36)

One cannot read this book without the total absorption that comes from recognition of its truth and admiration for the artistic truth into which that has been transposed. There are many characters, yet this is not so much a novel as a meditation on subjects and characters in a novel. Paton has made a meditation his own novelistic form. He seems more interested—and he succeeds in making the reader more interested—in his reflections on the characters and events than in these people and events themselves. When his characters speak—even the "voices," the marvelous ventriloquist's acts of Proud White Christian Woman and Van Onselen—it is quite simply Alan Paton speaking. This was, I think, a fault in some of his earlier work. He did not always succeed in creating what Patrick White has called the "cast of contradictory characters of which the writer is composed." But this time, yes, Alan Paton is speaking, and such is his skill, so individual the music of his lyricism, the snap of his staccato, the beauty of his syntax, that what ought to be a failure becomes somehow the strength of the work. Style is a matter of finding the one way to say exactly what you have to say. What Paton wants to say here is so central to his own experience, at conscious and subconscious levels, that it is natural to hear it in his own voice.

Why a novel, then, and not just another volume of his autobiography …? Ah, but this is not his story; it is part of ours, the South Africans'. That demands an imaginative transposition. This one is achieved with shining intelligence and acerbity, a young man's book with the advantage of an old man's experience of the battle with life and words. (pp. 36-7)