A review by seeceeread
Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
2.5
💠"I have lived my life in destruction."
Stephen Kumalo, a Zulu pastor, treks to Johannesburg to find his sister and his son.
Paton's ethics are a bit facile; he's insufficiently attentive to context and realistic motivations, and reaches pat moral conclusions. The secondary details of the book are much more interesting to me than the central characters or their plot lines. In particular, Kumalo's brother has abandoned the church and finnagles his own son out of charges. He's tossed out as selfish and dangerous, yet I'm drawn to his political oratory on the power of South African laborers to demand change. The author mentions mining and a bus boycott and challenges with housing, but obliquely – our MC mostly doesn't grapple with these.
Paton's misogynoir is hard to overlook. Black women are terribly depicted. As he opens, he literally likens Kumalo's wife to a beast of burden, telling us she's like an ox in "mute and patient suffering." Other women are expendable for any whisper of sexuality ... or virtuous only when they patronizingly patrol other women's behaviors, including laughter and eye contact.
The introduction sang of a bold, critical novel on South African apartheid. Not quite.
Stephen Kumalo, a Zulu pastor, treks to Johannesburg to find his sister and his son.
Spoiler
He finds the first easily; Gertrude is a prostitute with a young son and accepts his invitation to return to their childhood home. His son, Absalom, is harder to track; they finally reunite because the youth is detained for the accidental death of a man whose home he planned to rob. After some deliberation, Absalom is sentenced to death and Kumalo must go home with his new, pregnant daughter-in-law instead of his son. There, the umfundisi finds that the father of the man his son killed has had a dramatic change of politics and orchestrates new investments in the land and people of his desolate valley.Paton's ethics are a bit facile; he's insufficiently attentive to context and realistic motivations, and reaches pat moral conclusions. The secondary details of the book are much more interesting to me than the central characters or their plot lines. In particular, Kumalo's brother has abandoned the church and finnagles his own son
Spoiler
(also present at the murder)Paton's misogynoir is hard to overlook. Black women are terribly depicted. As he opens, he literally likens Kumalo's wife to a beast of burden, telling us she's like an ox in "mute and patient suffering." Other women are expendable for any whisper of sexuality ... or virtuous only when they patronizingly patrol other women's behaviors, including laughter and eye contact.
The introduction sang of a bold, critical novel on South African apartheid. Not quite.