[Alan Paton] started what seems to me almost a new era in South African writing. What is interesting about it is that other people had written not much less competently the sort of thing which Paton wrote in Cry, the Beloved Country, but somehow they did not set in motion the kind of cycle which Paton did. If you know Cry, the Beloved Country, you will know that it is a rather simple story. It is a narration of a black man in contact with a society which he doesn't really understand—a society in which he finds himself either unable to cope, or he finds himself sucked into the worst elements of that society. He ends as a criminal and the society is accused of having made him a criminal. All this is really very straightforward and, in a sense, almost trite—and I don't think Paton himself would mind if one described it in these terms.
One must not think in colour categories, but it is very difficult to resist thinking of Alan Paton as a white man, a sympathizing white man standing outside the South African society with all its complexities and dynamic tensions and reducing it to what is almost a parable, a simple little tale told with a certain lyricism which I think is sometimes false because it is almost like a kind of poetic prose; but telling a story which moved people, and caught people's attention…. It is almost as if a serious novel on the theme of the disintegration of African culture and society, a serious novel on the misfits in our culture, would not be accepted or would not be understood; but reduced to these simple, almost fabular, terms, it was intelligible and it made an impact. (pp. 95-6)
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