Cry, the Beloved Country (Scribner Classics)

I can't believe that I never read this as a child/young adult. What a beautiful, wrenching story. Read it: a classic.

This is an important book because it captures the tensions in South Africa in the 1940's before Apartheid became official. The book wrestles with several major social forces such as religion, tribal order, segregation, crime, law, and power. These forces are counterbalanced by love and kindness.

The book begins when Stephen Kumallo, a pastor living in the countryside, journeys to South Africa to find his sister who he heard has become ill. While in South Africa, Stephen also hopes to find his son who has traveled there several years ago, and also his brother, who has traveled there many years ago and never corresponded. Stephen's journey changes him forever as he encounters poverty, crime, and ultimately - tragedy. (I'll say no more because I don't want to include any spoilers). Stephen's journey shows him the challenges and upheavals of life in South Africa; specifically, the wide chasm between the rich and the poor, the white and the black.

The book is narrated by a wistful voice, often expressing yearning for the tribal Africa that once was before it was colonized by white men. The wistful tone sometimes becomes poetic, marveling at the exquisite beauty of Africa. The wistful tome sometimes becomes philosophical as it discusses the various approaches to the problems of South Africa. Some approaches favor keeping the black workers ignorant and therefore able to work in the gold mines only. Other approaches favored giving the black workers more rights and power because it is the right, Christian thing to do and because it would lower the crime rate and ease racial tensions.

The discussions can get tedious but the books is still a worthwhile read. The ideas raised in "Cry, the Beloved Country" lingered in my mind for awhile. Although the events occurred in a foreign country more than seventy years ago, the themes are by no means outdated; they are very much relevant to the social, racial and economic challenges facing us today.

This strange, lyrical novel is easily the most agonizing painful books I've ever read. Murder is perhaps the most overdone topic in the history of literature, but if all were done like this, we couldn't bear to read many. Published months before white supremacists created the legal system of apartheid (and set two years earlier, in the fall of 1946), the novel follows the fathers of an accidental killer and his unintended victim, starting before the murder and ending only after we get a sense of its ripple effects through the lives of whites and blacks as they try to make sense of the utterly pointless tragedy and the social system that led to it.

It's a novel that does little to try to flashily seduce the reader. It starts out with a description of a rural valley in South Africa, a description that is repeated later with some key differences. Then it moves dialogue that almost sounds off-key: there are no quotation marks, only dashes, to indicate speakers and the characters have an odd repetitious quality to their speech that puzzles at first. At the risk of only a little hyperbole, it sounds like this:

-- The sky is blue.
-- You say the sky is blue. His eyes flickered upward.
-- I say the sky is blue.
-- I understand. The man nodded.
-- You understand.

My initial reaction to this was, "Oh man, did I pay for this?" But then as the matters grow more serious, I learned to appreciate that such dialogue has a somber rhythm, if not beauty, to it. It is not so much repetition as characters recognizing each other's humanity.

And that is what makes this book so painful. Paton at every key moment goes for the perfectly understated emotion. The father of the murder victim does nothing histrionic -- there's simply this powerful scene in which he looks around his son's library, which is filled with passionate political books that mean nothing to him. He's forced to simultaneously confront the gulf that had arisen between himself and his son -- this sense that his own offspring is a mystery -- and also the grievous sense of loss in the quiet room (with the blood stain down the hallway). Scenes like this hurt.

Toward the end, there's a stretch of maybe thirty or forty pages in which the characters briefly become symbols and Paton seems to be letting whites off easy in their greater complicity. But Paton himself seems aware of this, as he has a character that I was starting to find unrealistic deny that he is a saint and another character points out how much of the blame rests with the sins against humanity of the whites. What to make of these possible missteps by Paton and his own attempt to ameliorate them become a moot point by the powerful final scene. It's simply a man watching the sunrise. Yet, because of what it means when the sun rises above the horizon, I think that scene will stay with me far longer than the last couple pages of any other novel I've ever read.

I am, I'm sure, reading this at a time when I'm particularly susceptible to its sentiments. After months of worrying about whether my infant son, who has just seemed like a bundle of vulnerability, I am watching him grow past the initial troubles that can beset a baby. He is starting to show a personality and I can begin to wonder what the future will hold in store for him. And this novel combines what are probably the two worst fates your child could experience: to murder or to be murdered. To me this is much more of a horror novel than some junk about a disturbed sadist with magical powers -- or whatever gets hawked under the label of `horror' these days.

From this point of view, I can only look with sadness on all the petulant one-star reviews by children forced to read this. Some teenagers are moved by this book, but clearly it's too soon for many of them. It's a pity, but there are other great works that can stir their souls and perhaps many should save this until later.

OMG! I read this book in high school and thought it was the most boring, torturous book ever. Now my daughter is reading it and was not just my immaturity that led me to that conclusion. Kumalo's trek to Johannesburg takes FOREVER. I was like oh just get there already. Tedious details and see it coming from a mile away plot developments will have you snoring away in no time. But for anyone who suffers from insomnia, this book should do the trick!

I WOULD GIVE THIS BOOK 15 STARS IF I COULD.
BEST BOOK THAT I HAVE READ IN A LLLOOONNNGGG TIME.
GREAT JOB!!

I reread this book after many many years only to find it even more powerful than I remembered. Paton has truly captured the human experience of sadness, joy, forgiveness, acceptance, and endurance. The character are complex, memorable, and genuine. Well deserves to be called a "classic."

I had a hard time deciding between three and four stars for this book. It is a classic and deals with a very difficult subject, but the story-line seems scattered at times. Paton was trying to communicate the pain, fear, and anger that punctuated life in South Africa in the 1940s. This sociological topic is difficult for young people to grasp...well, it's difficult for not-so-young people to grasp if they have never experienced it. Thus, I found the book's topic interesting and learned a lot. The main character was complex and well-rounded. The raw emotion was captured. Because of this, I give the book four stars. However, a word of caution: when you read it, be prepared to accept the slow-moving, disconnected story line and just enjoy the characters and the sociological portrayal.

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.

I can't believe I'd never heard of this book before I received the list of books my church ladies book group was going to cover this year. I could not put this book down. It is the story of two elderly South African men, one black and one white, who had never met until the lives of their only sons tragically intersect. The two men find, not only that their sons were not the sons of their youth but vastly different, indeed their fathers truly had no idea what kind of men they had become.

As they try to come to know and understand the men their sons had become, two fathers learn and grow, themselves becoming new men in the process.
I highly recommend this book - I only wish I'd known about it sooner!

Oh, and I'm so glad that I did not know it was an Oprah's book club pick because, sad but true, that would have turned me off of it before I even opened the cover!

This was a fantastic book and a great story. I absolutely loved it.