Alan Paton’s Too Late, the Phalarope—“Scarlet Letters in the Modern Age”

By Karen E.B. Elliott

Alan Paton wrote only three novels—the first he destroyed; the second is his most famous (Cry, the Beloved Country), and then his third is ridiculously painful to read.  But it’s so amazingly good, and so apropos for our students, especially as we live in and confront the tempting, technological age.  Although this novel takes place in South Africa post-WWII, and although it’s about the other whites, the non-English Afrikaners—the Boers, original Dutch settlers of Africa’s cape—it’s about good, old fashioned sin and our human nature to give into it, to hide it, to indulge in it further, and then to ask God in perverted prayer, “My God, why have you forsaken me?”

Blameshifting, unfortunately, is nothing new.  Adam did it to Eve, and then Eve did it to the devil.  It seems that the first sin is Biblical self-indulgence (if eating of the fruit is metaphorical), and it’s the inability to want to be honest—not only with God, but each other (especially the ones we claim to love), and even ourselves.  What is new, however, is that due to technology, we don’t necessarily even need to blameshift.  With the click of a mouse or the subtle movement of our thumbs, we can open an icon, browse, and then for too many who are savvy, delete the evidence as best we can.  Personally, I think the internet is the devil’s playground. Our good intentions to use it wisely and for good quickly submit to distractions…and too often, dangerous rabbit holes that make Lewis Carroll’s world look more like “The Hundred Acre Wood.”  It’s the new realm where evil can work incredibly effectively as it lodges itself into our souls like a stubborn splinter—mostly because we’re hiding our indulgences with too-great-of-ease, and then we’re heading to our classrooms, our church pews, the pulpits, the board meetings, our dinner-dates, or T-ball games all in the name of the Lord, when all the while we’re headed toward destruction, and maybe even to our personal hells, while destroying our families and too often even the greater communities in which we strive to live and serve.

Whether you’re Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim or nothing at all, confession in the 21^st century is not in our everyday vocabulary.  We don’t need it; after all, if you’re “born again,” baptized, circumcised or bowing upon your mat, we’re all set.  Plus, we’ve got Dr. Oz, Phil and of course Oprah and the Personal Growth section of Barnes and Noble, or worse, we’ve got those few family members or friends from prayer group who help us rationalize our sin because after all as an Evangelical, it’s very important to understand where the secular world is coming from. We’re just trying to live in the world, but most of the time, we are of it.  We have, or shall we say temptation has, convinced us that by understanding the other guy’s point of view, we’re really leading them to the Kingdom. But as the narrator of Too Late, the Phalarope declares, “because [he] did not entreat or repent, he was destroyed…[and we] were destroyed with him” (Paton 4).   This novel is a necessary read.  It convicts and re-convicts its reader.  Like the protagonist and anti-hero, Pieter, the reader can identify with the terror of being discovered when we know we’ve indulged too much in our sin, and when we pray, like Pieter, “it was another mercy that he sought, not to be saved from sin, but from its consequence” (157).

The novel is not like Cry, the Beloved Country which is characteristically Christian and accepted as such even at secular, liberal institutions due to its African and multi-cultural setting.  Too Late, the Phalarope is much harder to swallow.  It goes deeper into the faith where many Christians are frightened to go.  Paton’s characters are in fact deeply committed Christians.  Their questions are not about God’s existence, is He real, or whether or not He is in fact absolute truth.  No, the issue is that God is all-too-real and true for them. Their questions are more like, “If God knew Adam and Eve would sin, why didn’t He stop them?” or “Why does God often sit back and watch us fall on our faces?”  Consequently, why does He allow not only the sinner, but his whole family “to be destroyed?”—a phrase and question which is repeated poetically throughout the novel, as only Paton can do, until its rhetorical and bitter end.

On the surface, Paton’s story is very Hawthorne-esque.  There’s the adulterer, Pieter, a respected lieutenant, “that to the black people in [his district]…he was like a god” (21); however, the adulteress, Stephanie, is a youthful native who, unlike Hester Prynne, has no remorse or desire for accountability. She is a survivor in an apartheid culture which oppresses her, and it’s continually noted during one of her many court appearances for selling liquor illegally, that she often stands there “smiling her secret smile. Then she would think it not right to smile, or perhaps her smile has some time angered someone in authority, for she would frown as though by that she would show respect for the law and court, and would show she was not careless and indifferent. So she went between smiling and frowning…with the strange innocence that made me [the narrator, Pieter’s aunt] pity her, though innocent she could hardly be” (64-65).  As a result, Paton complicates things because the Roger Chillingworth figure is no longer a stock character as Hawthorne caricatured him.  Paton plants the devilish figure in all of his characters save Pieter’s mother who, even at the end shows respect for her husband’s wishes to banish not only Pieter, their son, after he is discovered, but any who befriend him; instead, she displays great mercy for her endangered son and his wife and children.

The novel is also written honestly because it’s told through the eyes of Pieter’s favorite aunt, Sophie, who is apparently disfigured facially (although we’ve not given the details) and who never married.  She lives with her brother, Jakob, and his wife who are care for her and permit her to indulge their children, primarily Pieter whom she loves with sensational bias.  He loves her too, and is at times overwhelmed by how much she seems to understand him, particularly his thought process.  Interspersed throughout her account of Pieter’s inevitable downfall are selections from his diary where he clarifies her account as though to assure the reader that although she loves him unremittedly, we can trust what she declares is mostly true. This in and of itself is a great example of  the literary technique point-of-view, but also how we, as Christians or people of faith (or even no faith, ironically), decide who deserves destruction by God’s hand and who doesn’t based on our emotions or connections toward certain individuals.  Aunt Sophie continually questions “why him?” but then she admits that on more than one occasion “his [Pieter’s] dark face was suddenly lit up, as though there were some lamp of the soul that turned off and on…and that the light of the body is the eye, and when the eye is true then is the body full of light, but when the eye is evil, then the body is dark.  Darkness and light, how they fought for his soul, and the darkness destroyed him, the gentlest and bravest of men”  (28).  Here, and too many other places, Sophie reminds us that no one is exempt from evil or temptation.  Evil and temptation look for our weaknesses—a crack not seen by most—and then they pry it open slowly.  And ironically, just like Pieter, we know that this is happening, but we do nothing to stop it; moreover, nor do those who love us the most do anything about it either.  Sophie admits in the first chapter (one of my favorite first-chapters of any book I’ve read) that even though Pieter “spoke bitter words to me [because he knew she was on to him], and shut the door of his soul on me, and I withdrew it. But I should have cried out there not ceasing, for behind it was a man in danger,” and she furthers by adding that “may the Lord Jesus Christ have mercy upon me, that I held peace that was no peace at all” (1).  This admittance is crucial to ponder.  If we care about our brothers and sisters in Christ, then why do we let them get away with their sins in the name of Christian love?

This is something we struggle with each and every day.  Student leaders at a Christian school are afraid to “call out” their friends on partying or even language, particularly using God’s name in vain.  It’s flabbergasting the amount of rationalization I hear from students to call anyone out on anything, particularly their closest friends who are doing clearly destructible things.  We certainly don’t have much difficultly with a nasty comment or a thumbs down on a post we don’t like, but when it comes to anyone we declare to love, we won’t even tell them if they have broccoli between their teeth.  And Sophie yearns to go back in time in order to call her beloved nephew and save him and her family “from destruction”; however, she admits with sorrow and regret that at this point she is “beyond anger and loss, being, as the world sees it, myself destroyed” (4).Thus, this is how the novel begins as Sophie painfully accounts all those lost moments—chances, or opportunities given by God—where she could have said more, done more to keep her nephew from Evil’s grip.  All too often my students, family member, or friends are doing the same thing, and it’s difficult; because like Sophie, I know some of their pain. We’re older and experienced, but to know that the iron is hot and not warn them before they touch it, and then watch them touch it again because now they’re so burnt they’re numb from the pain and destruction it’s causing…to watch them do this in the name of experience or “they’ll learn” according to Paton is a sin—i