A sad social drama in the migrant workers milieu of Johannesburg, South Africa, during the post- war and pre- apartheid years of the 1940s.

Young men leave their tribal areas to find work and hopes for a better life near the big city in the gold mines, where the money is. For most of them, the move means life in a shanty town, backbreaking work and minimal payment, disease and misery, broken families, prostitution and alcoholism, crime and punishment. The money is for the white men.
It is fear that rules this country. (And maybe the saddest thought is that crime is still the main fear in the country even now, after the race issue has largely gone away.)

The story is told in simple language, starkly realistic at times, or touchingly poetic at others, like Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, which it resembles in its language, narrative structure and sad humor. There is also the thematic similarity of the erosion which destroys soils and drives people to miserable places.
We follow a parson from a tribal village on a trip to Jo-burg, where he searches for his son. The search is elusive for a time. It is an odyssey through the social reality of the city: the church, the black politicians of different colors, a bus boycott, the shanty towns, a reformatory, the hopelessness of a teen pregnancy, the penal system.
We listen in on white conversations about what to do with the blacks and their unruly and disturbing behavior.

The second part of the novel follows the father of a murdered white man. The victim was a fighter for reason and fairness, and he got killed by blind stupid fate. The father gets to know his son through tales about him, through his papers on his desk, through his library. There was a strong fixation on Lincoln. The old man begins to search for his son, like the other father in the first part, but now in the spiritual and intellectual sense.
We learn more on the mining industry, on unions and strikes.

This was Paton's first novel, and it was a huge success, enabling him to stop working as a reformatory manager in order to become a professional writer. But then he chose to walk on yet another path: he became a politician with the Liberal Party, opposing the politics of the apartheid regime. He is mentioned in Mandela's memoirs among the men who tried to fight his prison term.
Does this mean that the novel is propaganda? I would say: emphatically no. It does not take any side but the one of humanity and morality. It does not preach or indoctrinate, nor try to convince us of a political program.

This is a book about fear and sorrow. Fear is like a storm. Sorrow is when the storm has destroyed the house. One can do nothing about the storm, but one can rebuild the house. Sorrow is better than fear.

Thanks to Judy P., who convinced me that I need to read this. It is really one of the great novels of the century.

I picked this book up from my bookcase, where apparently, I had bought it sometime ago when it was recommended to me by someone. I was in between books and thought for Christmas, I needed a classic to read and this book is way better than I ever expected. It is a classic for the ages and the language is absolutely beautiful, heart-wrenching and lyrical. What makes this book even more beautiful is that I can relate to it even today, though I know little of South Africa and its history. Unfortunately, I see a lot of similarities between South Africa and our own history.

The back of the book simply states that this book is about a man and his son in the depths of South Africa. Do not be misled by that simplest of blurbs. This book is about a lot more than a complicated father-son relationship. It is about the deep love the natives have for their country, the deep divide between the minority (the whites that have come to power) and the natives, and the unsettling of the tribes now that the land can no longer provide for them. It is a complicated book about a lot of issues that comes to head when the minister's son killed a white man. It gets even more interesting when the white man's father (Jarvis) finds in his heart the ability to listen to what his son was trying to do all those years. It turned out that Jarvis' son was a social worker in the highest sense of the word. He was trying to reconcile the divide between the natives and the uprooting of their tribal customs and trying to bring about the differences. The minister, Stephen Kumalo, went to Johannesburg to look for his son, but only was he too late to save his son.

Paton touched upon so much in this tiny book and handles all the difficult subjects well. One could feel the anguish of Kumalo when he finds his son and hears his sentence of death. One could feel the pain of a man who is called to attend to his son because his son was murdered and that he knew his son's murderer's father. Interwoven throughout the men's pain and grief, are stories of a land that is now rendered apart by two different races.

One cannot just pick this book up and read it without being affected. This book is one of those that will haunt you long after the last page has been turned. It is a book about love, hatred, indifference and greed but also of hope and promises. It is rich in details and it is one of my absolute favorite books to recommend for others to read. It really is a must-read for all serious readers because it will touch upon your heart.

12/28/09