Word: paton
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Alan Paton-Saunders...
...night a small-town cop in South Africa got drunk and took a black woman into the bushes. This, in plain words, is the subject of Alan Paton's second novel, Too Late the Phalarope. However, as readers of his first novel well know. Author Paton does not write in plain words. The prose in Cry, the Beloved Country sounded to some like the language of a very gifted high-school senior who has cried Tom Wolfe once too often. To others, especially to those who were not disturbed to find the rhythms of the King James Version forced...
...book, Paton's manner has far more tedious, the treatment of the subject matter far less convincing. Pieter van Vlaanderen, the policeman, faces the problems of a full-blooded man who suffers from a prudish wife, a puritanical society and his own rigidly conventional conscience. So, after a long moral struggle that is talked about a great deal but hardly described at all, he gives in to his lust and goes after the girl Stephanie. By the scheming of a subordinate on the police force, he is caught, tried, and sent to jail (under South Africa's Immorality...
...defiant men & women packed into a small, smoky, underground hall beneath St. Mary's Anglican Cathedral in Johannesburg. As cops of Malan's "Special Branch" looked on, white lawyers, teachers, clergymen and office workers boldly sat side by side with Africans and Indians. Novelist Alan Paton (Cry, the Beloved Country), a party founder, spoke with apostolic fervor: "For the first time we openly proclaim the things we believe ... In Africa the imperative need is to create some kind of common society for white and black . . . Color bars imposed by the whites have produced only misery for white...
...good, churchgoing Boers goggled at these revelations of Liberal wickedness, and cried Skande (a scandal). The respectable anti-Malanites were also scandalized. Cried the Rand Daily Mail: "South Africa is not yet ready for Liberalism." Before returning to Natal, where he works in a tuberculosis sanitarium for Zulus, Alan Paton had a parting word: "He who waits until the time is ripe often waits until it is rotten...