SOURCE: "Alan Paton: Bringing a Sense of the Sacred," in World Literature Today, Vol. 57, No. 2, Spring, 1983, pp. 233-37.

In the following essay, Moss traces environmental, liturgical, and spiritual influences in Paton's art.

There is a country its writers do not name. Not all, or not in all works. But time after time, and more frequently during the last decade, we read the country's name into a negative space where, in works from another country, we would find a name. Or we read a circumlocution. Or we read an invented name and geography through whose features we recognize known eyes.

There may be many reasons its writers do not name this country. For some, no name presents the country as their own. Their intimate experience of the place, its land, its people and its voices may be so different from anything evoked by the common political title that they...