The Smell of Apples

The author’s decision of how to relate the events of a story impacts how the reader understands that story and its themes. Limited omniscience is a narrative framing strategy in which, to provide immediacy to the events, the story is handed over to a single narrator who relates the events, and whose telling of the events ultimately determines how we perceive them. In short, these same narrative events would carry a different reading had the narration been handed over to, say, Ilse, who would tell a far different story. Perspective determines theme.

In traditional limited omniscient narratives (and Moby-Dick, which Ilse pores over, is perhaps the most notable example in American fiction), the tacit assumption is that the reader will not get caught up in the plot but rather will trace how those events impact the controlling narrator. Moby-Dick, then, is not so much about a mad captain tracking a rogue whale across the southern Pacific Ocean but more about how that experience alters Ishmael, the book’s timid and naïve narrator.

Thus, as a limited omniscient narration, The Smell of Apples is about the evolution—or lack thereof—in the moral perception of the man-child who serves as narrator. Behr carefully preserves the voice of a child—the vocabulary is adolescent, and the sentences are direct, unencumbered by elaborate construction. The witnessing voice is never impacted by adult outrage or even adult understanding. Marnus sees, Marnus records; outrage is left to the reader. The experience makes reading the novel claustrophobic, like being locked in an elevator.

As readers, we want—even expect—change from a limited omniscient narrator. Racism, however, is stubborn and cannot be easily excised. From the perspective of 20 years later, Marnus, now within moments of his own death in a military campaign sustained by the ruthless propaganda of an illegitimate government, has only begun to question that government. Unlike his sister, Marnus clings to his father’s racist absolutism and, just moments from death, ironically confirms the rightness of that vision. 

At the heart of the decades-long international campaign to end apartheid was a simple argument: More than two centuries after arriving in the southern regions of Africa, the Dutch Europeans simply did not belong there. The Dutch were something of an invasive species, and their continuing presence in black South Africa only prevented that region from rediscovering its roots and finding its own culture, government, economy, and identity.

The story of the rotten apples is a pointed parable about this. As the family returns from a trip to country with a car full of fresh apples, the father mentions as a point of pride that apples were brought to South Africa by the Dutch. “[T]his country was empty before our people arrived. Everything, everything you see, we built up from nothing. This is our place, given to us by God and we will look after it. […] Even the apples we brought to this country” (124). Later, a bowl of those same apples begins to rot, and the sour odor hangs about the Erasmuses’ kitchen. The morning after Marnus sees the sexual violation of his friend by his father, the two awkwardly prepare to go outside to play. They grab apples for a snack but quickly smell the rotten stench on their hands. It is a smell that cannot be easily wiped clean, not even by a generous dip in antibacterial soap. The apples can only be thrown away.

Marnus, even as he sniffs his fingers in evident disgust, does not see what we see. Something indeed is rotten in the state of South Africa. Like the apples imported long ago to South Africa, the whites represent an invasive species—something that does not fit within the ecosystem of the region and thus is only able to cause it harm, upending its otherwise carefully maintained and managed order. Over time, the Afrikaners, like the plucked apples in the Erasmuses’ kitchen, began to rot. Their amorality, and their fanatic willingness to use any tactics to maintain their desperate control of the government and the economy, created a moral stench that lingers. After all, apples cannot un-rot. Ultimately, Behr intones, they can only be discarded. 

False Bay is a broad inlet off the Atlantic Ocean that provides Cape Town some of its most tourist-friendly vistas. Used for commercial fishing since the Dutch settlers arrived in the 18th century, the bay, teeming with fish, became indispensable to Cape Town’s economic prominence in the mid-20th century. The name for the bay derived from generations of Dutch sailors who, before European cartographers mapped the South African coast, mistook False Bay for another much larger bay far to the north.

Marnus loves spending time along the edge of False Bay: he walks its concrete queue, fishes its surf, studies its choppy horizon for whales, and lingers along its empty beaches. Indeed, the family’s roomy home was built to take advantage of the overlook to the Bay. That sun-washed view inspires the young boy daily to appreciate the beauty of his country. It is the gorgeous sunrise over False Bay that occasions the closing (ironic) observation by young Marnus, now reeling from indisputable evidence of the depravity of his father and the victimhood of his only friend, that God blesses South Africa and every day is more spectacular than the one before.

For Behr, who grew up in the environs of Cape Town, the bay’s curious name suggests deception and the irony of appearances that define the vision of young Marnus. Despite its gorgeous appearance, the bay is dead. The commercial fishing is gone, tapped by the exploitation of the rapacious whites; whale sightings are rare. The beaches are deserted. For Behr, the condition of the bay and its name symbolize how, within the limited perceptions of his young narrator, nothing is what it seems. Marnus’s family is far from idyllic, despite the appearance of a loving family in a well-to-do-neighborhood. The father is a pedophile; the mother is depressed; and his sister is a discontent just waiting to escape the confines of this seemingly perfect home. Schools, government, the military, and even the churches are as morally dead as the Bay is biologically dead, each sustained only through lies and deceptions. In the end, Marnus’s home and culture is False Bay.