I am drawn back again and again to Alan Paton’s Too Late the Phalarope (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953). It is the story of Pieter van Vlaanderen, a white policeman torn between conforming to the social standards of South Africa under apartheid and struggling against them because they violate his sense of humanity. “He was always two men,” says his aunt Sophie, the novel’s narrator. “The one was the soldier of the war. . . . The other was the dark and silent man, hiding from all men his secret knowledge of himself.”
Tragically, van Vlaanderen’s very compassion leads to his destruction. Although abundantly respected by his peers, he is tormented with feelings of rejection by his wife and father. When he reaches out to help a young black woman, determined to prevent the state from taking away her child, he senses in her a haven of acceptance. Their liaison spells his downfall in a society where interracial sex is punishable by banishment or imprisonment.
There is far more to this novel than its plot. Paton’s prose is so powerful it forces the reader to share responsibility for the protagonist’s ruin. We cry for this man because his dilemma is ours. I can list hundreds of books that have created and sustained my moral base, but I still return to Paton for the complexity of the issues he addresses, the beauty of his writing, and his message that life must be built on a foundation of forgiveness and love.
Lynn Ruth Miller, MA ’64, wrote the autobiographical novel Starving Hearts (2000) and Thoughts While Walking the Dog (2001), both published by Excentrix Press. She lives in Pacifica, Calif., and teaches Bay Area art and writing workshops.
