WHITE MAN'S BURDEN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 757, 22 January 1954, Page 13

WHITE MAN'S BURDEN

TOO LATE THE PHALAROPE, by Alan Paton; Jonathan Cape, English price 10/6. RATOONS, by Daphne Rooke; Victor Gollancz, English price 12/6. IETER VAN VLAANDEREN is a man "of great strength and great weakness" who commits the unforgivable sin of his community, where it is an iron law that no white man can touch a black woman. The sad consequences of Pieter’s act of miscegenation are depicted in this second novel by the author of Cry, the Beloved Country, who. builds a pattern of lament about his fine upstanding young South African, a lieutenant of police and a great Rugby player who might one day have been captain of the Springboks if he hadn’t succumbed to his desire for a pretty Negro girl. Pieter is trapped not by his own conscience but by an envious subordinate in the police force who observes his crime and pins a note to his door: "I saw you." He is arrested and imprisoned, his wife deserts* him, his father dies of grief, and his whole family is ostracised. The story is told mainly by Pieter’s Aunt Sophie, in the familiar Old Testament rhythms that distinguished Alan Paton’s first book. But the material is thinly stretched out, and the passages of lament and self-recrimination become tedious. In Ratoons we move across to Natal, with its polo-playing ranchers, the Lamberts, their Zulu servants, and the Indian sugarcane farmer Mr. Bannerjee. The moral problem here involves a British South African girl who has an illegitimate child by a Boer youngster, Chris Van der Westhuizen. There is a good deal of morbid violence in the stoty, which is set in the time of the First World War. The exuberance of Daphne Rooke’s earlier novels, A Grove of Fever Trees and Mittee, is replaced by a flat disenchantment with life which may well be a true reflection of the contemporary South African scene.

P.J.

W.