Cry, the Beloved Country is listed on the LibraryThing recommendations for All Quiet on the Western Front, which I just read and absolutely loved. After reading Alan Paton's novel, I can certainly see the similarities between the two. Both are honest, raw looks at a tragic situation, and both focus on the fundamentals of human nature. Cry, the Beloved Country is set in 1946 South Africa; Paton uses the story of a minister and his son as a catalyst to a larger look at South African racial issues.

The plot, while interesting, is not really the main feature of Cry, the Beloved Country. Rather, it is Paton's message that comes through. He tackles the complex relationship between the "white man" and the "native," and the abrupt changes to societal structures occurring in South Africa. Interspersed in the novel are chapters containing anecdotes on life in Johannesburg. These segments paint a picture of a country divided, and of a society on the brink of upheaval. Paton includes many political views in his novel, and one of the central turning points in the plot involves a rich white farmer adopting his son's progressive take on race. These views, though articulated in 1946, are nevertheless relevant today - and thus so is Paton's novel.

Cry, the Beloved Country is not an easy book. Emotionally, it takes its toll, and it demands your intellectual attention. Some sections drag, and several paragraphs require multiple readings. This is not a book for a day at the beach, but a book to read carefully, to discuss, and to reread. ( )

Moving story about a senseless murder set in a South African landscape of astonishing beauty contrasted by the ugliness of big-city-Johannesburg, Apartheid, and Racial Tension. ( )

This is the story of an old black priest from the South African countryside who goes to Johannesburg to find that his sister and son have turned wrong. It's a story about race relations during apartheid, about hope. I really enjoyed this book. The writing style is a little unusual and it's not always clear who is talking, but I actually found it enjoyable to be taken to a different narrative style. ( )

A beautiful, classic story of two men, one black, one white, who share a country, a tragedy, and a hope. I first read this in high school, when I surely was not equipped to understand or appreciate it. Yet I did remember something of the "feel" of the book...the almost serene poignancy of the story, and Stephen Kumalo's profound love of the land despite the inability of his people to prosper on it under existing conditions. I don't recall whether any attempt was made to place this novel in historical context when I read it first. It would have been quite obvious then, twenty years after the book's publication, that the commonalities discovered by the two bereaved men in this novel were not holding sway over race relations in South Africa. The action takes place two years before the Nationalist Party came to power there, leading to the system of fully institutionalized racism known as apartheid. It is not, therefore, as many of the reviews here would have it, a novel "about apartheid". It is, to some extent, about the injustice of the treatment of native Africans by the whites in control, and it certainly illuminates social issues of its particular time and place. But it is mostly about the human heart, and I think it works best on a non-political level, as an exploration of human dignity. The language is lovely, and moving, often in the style of oral story-telling, with repeated phrases, like the refrain of a song or poem. ( )

Stephan Kumalo and James Jarvis live in the same small town in 1946 South Africa. Kumalo is a black parson; Jarvis a white plantation owner. Though their paths never cross in their town, they do in Johannesburg when the son of Kumalo kills the son of Jarvis in a senseless act of robbery. No murder was to take place, just the robbery, but the plans of a scared and needy young man go awry and the worst happens. And yet the two fathers come to an understanding and no wrath crosses between them. Jarvis even gives aid to Kumalo's struggling people back in the small town they are both from. Kumalo's son dies, but there is a sense of some hope in a time and place where hope could have been abandoned and as time would tell, life would be alright - with a little hope. ( )