Cry, the Beloved Country
by Alan Paton
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Book Summary Information
Author: Alan PatonEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-12-02
ISBN: 074326195X
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Scribner
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Book Reviews of Cry, the Beloved Country
Book Review: Trying to Talk about Evil and Good
Summary: 5 Stars
Alan Paton was a very great man. In addition to being an author, he spent many years managing a large reformatory, bringing to the inmates some amazingly humane ways of doing things. If prison is intended to reform criminals, to make them happy and productive members of society, Paton was one of the most successful penologists in history. That he did this in South Africa with a group of predominately black inmates, just before apartheid became law, makes his achievement all the more remarkable. It also placed him in a unique position to write "Cry, the Beloved Country".
Most of the story follows Stephen Kumalo, a clergyman in a small village whose son Absalom, like many of the young people, has raced off to Johannesburg where things are happening. They sure are; Reverend Stephen travels there to find his sister and discovers in the meantime that Absalom is under arrest for murdering a white man while in the process of burglarizing his home. The victim, Arthur Jarvis, has been a leader in the movement toward equal rights in South Africa. Doubling this irony is the fact that the victim is also the son of a white landowner near Reverend Kumalo's village.
In other words, this is an impossible story to tell. You know what's going to happen; whether the young man is executed or not, everyone's going to behave in that terribly noble manner. The black folks in particular, whether submissive or angry, will all show themselves in the best possible light, and many of the white folks will do the same. There will be reconciliation and copious tears. We readers will come away from this novel enlightened, feeling wonderful about the brotherhood of man. Disgusting.
Not quite. Although Paton didn't manage to avoid that halo altogether, he steered clear of it surprisingly well. Neither Kumalo nor Jarvis, Arthur's father, could possibly live where they do without thinking about racial issues, but Paton is magnificent at showing how ambivalent their thoughts can be. As is always the case with good fiction, these characters behave like real people - they have no pure element within them, neither pure good nor pure evil, neither pure love of the black or white population nor pure hatred - and the more real they are, the more we can identify with them. When you read a novel you want to immerse yourself in it, and you can only do that if it rings true. (That goes for novels of the fantastic as well, by the way, but we'll talk about that some other time.)
Speaking of immersing yourself in a novel, Paton's language here shows that he would probably have made a great poet. The descriptions are wonderful, whether applied to great beauty or great misery, and he gave each character a highly individual voice, something many authors neglect. And then there's the fact that he shows us the people's thoughts in similarly gorgeous language, reflecting deep feelings, in what was clearly an African idiom rather than the clichés of melodrama. It's touching to see that he respected his characters to that extent, as he seems to have respected the real people of his nation.
As the title implies, this novel describes the landscape in some detail - not so much as to drag, but enough to show that one can truly fall in love with a place. Personally, I've always been more concerned with a story's characters than its environment, but this is one of the comparatively few that have really shown me how powerful setting can be. "Cry" starts out with a description of a road to Reverend Kumalo's village, which the narrator describes as "lovely". Not a word you would ordinarily associate with a road, and it shows the people's attachment to their place. The surprise is that loving a place, according to Paton and his characters, is not necessarily such a good thing. It gives you too much to lose, especially if the place you love is full of pain and fear. That, rather than the uplifting journey that these people go through towards enlightenment, is the real power of this novel, lending some heft to its themes and preventing the plot from drifting off into the glowing pink clouds.
Those themes are dangerous. Anyone who tries to write fiction about enormous historical events, like apartheid, runs the risk of having the theme dwarf the story. Paton's strategy is brilliant - his characters think about things like race relations, but rarely talk about those things. Jarvis in particular, even after the death of his son, speaks very rarely about what he thinks of his black neighbors or the black African peoples. In fact, he speaks very rarely about anything at all. His actions change radically, though. Even Reverend Kumalo keeps his mouth pretty well shut about race relations. Like a good clergyman, he talks a good deal about God, but what with the troubles of his sister and son, his reflections on God became less certain as time goes on, until finally his most moving action about God takes place in utter silence.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said "What we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence", a demand that all too many people fail to obey. I mean, any speech regarding certain subjects, like apartheid, diminishes those subjects, but you have to deal with them somehow, don't you? I said that Alan Paton was a great man, and this is not only because of his courage in facing down a great evil, but also because he found a way to write a great novel about a subject which should ideally be met with respectful silence. At the very least, "Cry, the Beloved Country" works because it concerns two men who confront that subject with respectful silence, and its author showed us why that is the proper response.
Benshlomo says, if you must talk about the big subjects, at least do so with care.
Summary of Cry, the Beloved Country
Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much."The most famous and important novel in South Africa's history, and an immediate worldwide bestseller when it was published in 1948, Alan Paton's impassioned novel about a black man's country under white man's law is a work of searing beauty. The eminent literary critic Lewis Gannett wrote, "We have had many novels from statesmen and reformers, almost all bad; many novels from poets, almost all thin. In Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country the statesman, the poet and the novelist meet in a unique harmony."
Cry, the Beloved Country is the deeply moving story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son, Absalom, set against the background of a land and a people riven by racial injustice. Remarkable for its lyricism, unforgettable for character and incident, Cry, the Beloved Country is a classic work of love and hope, courage and endurance, born of the dignity of man.
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