Sex on the Veld

TOO LATE THE PHALAROPE (276 pp.)

Alan Paton--Saunders ($3.50).

One 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 on secular prose, it sounded like the voice of a new prophet, crying in the wilderness of South Africa.' But most critics agreed that Author Paton' had a very compelling manner, if not a truly original style, and that he had painstakingly wedded manner to matter, especially in describing the life of his beloved country and the tragedy of the Negro in South African society.

In his new 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 Act). His father, a stern old Boer scratches his name out of the family Bible and quietly dies. His wife leaves him. The whole family is ostracized by the community. "And I grieve for him," writes Paton, "and the house he has made to fall with him, not as with Samson the house of his enemies, but the house of his own flesh and blood. And I grieve for the nation which gave him birth, that left the trodden and the known for the vast and secret continent, and made there songs of heim-wee and longing, and the iron laws."

It is all very well for Author Paton to indulge in such threnodies for his hero, rather in the manner of the chorus in a Greek tragedy. But if he had called off his chorus now and then and given his characters some elbow room, he might at least have made Too Late the Phalarope a little clearer than its title. The phalarope (a small bird like a sandpiper) serves Author Paton as a symbol for innocence. Hard to say just why.

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