Below, Watts discusses the classical, epic, psychological, and religious dimensions of Too Late the Phalarope.

Below, Thompson explains how Too Late the Phalarope manifests universality despite the contemporary relevance of the novel's historical aspects.

In the following essay, Hooper investigates the function and effects of Stephanie's "silence" in Too Late the Phalarope.

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

For some years Paton's literary reputation rested on two successful novels and a handful of short stories. But the judgment of the future may rank his biographies of Jan Hofmeyr and Archbishop Geoffrey Clayton as well as his own autobiographical writings as a comparable literary achievement. (p. 92) Paton's Hofmeyr is, essentially, about the moral and intellectual development of a man whose lot was to become deputy prime minister for a time and afterwards to be rejected because of his liberal ...

In the following essay, originally printed in 1949 in The New York Times Review as regular feature interviews, Breit asks Paton about the differences between South African and American blacks, his career preoccupations, and his literary influences and methods.

In the following essay, Stevens examines Sophie's function and position as narrator in Too Late the Phalarope in terms of the novel's concerns with the natures of obedience and love.

Much has been published recently about the decline of tragedy, and the question has been asked whether tragedy can be written in this age. Offstage, during the discussion, Alan Paton went ahead and did it—in terms of the novel—in Too Late the Phalarope. It was the book that followed his much-acclaimed first novel, Cry, the Beloved Country. It offered him, therefore, all the notorious "second book" challenges, as well as the problems of tragedy. The two books are an interesting st...

In the review below, Romano celebrates the classical emphasis on human truths and values of Ah, But Your Land Is Beautiful.

Too Late the Phalarope invites us to think of Alan Paton more simply as a novelist than as a kind of Christian plenipotentiary to South Africa. Not that Cry the Beloved Country is a religious tract, or natural accident—but the literary qualities of the first book, which seem to have sprung from the very ground, seem in the second imported. Though Too Late the Phalarope is no patchwork, its relative limitations can be detected. I think, squarely in the midst of its new 'literary' feature...

In the review below, Minter outlines the major events of Paton's life covered in Journey Continued.

In Paton's novels one hears voices. That is his method. It derives perhaps—fascinatingly—from the secret level at which the suprarational of creative imagination and the suprarational of religious belief well up together in him. In Phalarope a voice bore witness to the undoing of a young man by racist laws that made a criminal act out of a passing sexual infidelity. A loving relative watched what she was powerless to prevent; hers was the voice of compassion. In Ah, But Your Land is Bea...

In terms of tragedy as the rest of the world knows it, there is a tragedy in Alan Paton's Too Late the Phalarope—the private tragedy of a man of fine instincts in conflict with an instinct that seems misplaced from some earlier, brutish existence. The writer takes care to endow his hero with noble attributes and virtues, and provides that he shall bring about his own downfall, thus fulfilling the classical conditions of tragedy…. Peter van Vlaanderen is a Greek-godlike young man with [a...

It is not surprising that six of the ten Tales From A Troubled Land should be set within the framework and atmosphere of a reformatory, an environment at once the reflection and the microcosm of South Africa itself. Author Alan Paton is well acquainted with the setting that he uses,… but the "reformatory" stories are unfortunately and somewhat tediously similar in theme and texture. None really approaches the tender and almost "fey" quality of Cry The Beloved Country or To...

Knocking on the Door is a collection of short pieces written between 1923 and 1974 and hitherto unpublished or otherwise inaccessible. The chronological arrangement provides insight into the growth of Paton's moral vision, and the book is less valuable for the "creative" pieces, which are of minor importance in his canon, than for the articles and speeches, which are vital to an understanding of the tensions and contradictions which burden the life of South Africa and which provide much...

["Tales from a Troubled Land"] is a collection of ten tales, one superb, one first-rate, the remainder of lesser quality. To begin with the best, "Life for a Life" ranks with the most moving writing the author has ever done. It tells of the events that follow the murder of a rich Afrikaner farmer, as seen from the viewpoint of his colored laborers…. The writing is dark with the menace of approaching retribution. Once more the meekness of the colored folk is contrasted with...

Although Alan Paton has come to be known as the poet of South African race relations, his point of greatest involvement often seems to be the more universal and eternal mystery of father-son relations…. [In his play Sponono] the same theme occasionally comes to the surface to capture our deeper interest in this admirable if routine portrait of life in a South African reformatory. For while Mr. Paton and his collaborator, Krishna Shah, have with some success caught the whole panorama of a reformatory ...

"I have been a teacher all my life", says the now septuagenarian Alan Paton in his absorbing Towards the Mountain…. However, if after … much discouragement in confronting some of the most disturbing problems of our century—racism, nationalism, violence—this indefatigable man is still trying to teach us something, he has chosen the most engaging way of doing it. The account of his youth and early career as a science master, husband and lover against the background of...

"Ah, But Your Land Is Beautiful" shows no slackening of either [Paton's] hope or his realism. This novel is as vigorously and as exquisitely written as anything he has produced. It has the eloquence, the special commingling of sweetness and anger, the Orwellian force and lucidity, familiar to readers of "Too Late the Phalarope" … and several other volumes since. Its tone is quietly anguished. Its classical appeal is based on a direct and simple confidence that the f...