The Smell of Apples

Apartheid was unsustainable without a culture of racism. For people whose vision is not determined by the bigotry and paranoia of racism, racism can seem not only unjust but incoherent, even illogical. Understanding the logic of it—that is, coming to terms with how others, otherwise clear thinking and even Christian, can embrace such a narrowed vision that is sustained only by denigrating an entire race into objects—can be perplexing. Without harsh irony and without patronizing the white South African culture, Behr opts to reveal the odious logic of racism by showing how it infected a generation of children coming of age in such a social and cultural context.

There is no larger framing voice of moral authority to caution the reader against embracing the racism of the characters. Rather, we see how easily the world can be distorted to justify fear and bigotry. Marnus never actually meets any of the country’s Bantu population—rather, his parents and teachers caution him that these indigenous peoples are threats, little more than animals that need to be controlled, contained, and avoided.

Importantly, Marnus has several significant relationships with Coloreds, the designation within apartheid South Africa of any native with some white blood in their lineage: the family’s long-suffering domestic Doreen, the grizzled fisherman Jan Bandjies, and Chrisjan, the family’s former gardener, who was wrongfully accused by Marnus’s mother of absconding with expensive fishing gear before he abruptly left the household staff. These so-called inferior humans treat Marnus with more compassion, respect, and dignity than the boy receives from his parents, his friends, or his teachers—and yet, those experiences do not impact Marnus’s conviction that these mixed-raced natives are second-class people. Thus, the reader sees what the narrator does not, indeed cannot.

By giving voice to the logic of racism through the thoughts and voice of a child, Behr depends on the reader to provide the saving distance of irony. The logic that racists inevitably produce racists is challenged here only by the evolution of Ilse, whose independent-thinking, wide-ranging intellectual pursuits and global perspective provide the evidence that the dark logic of racism is neither irresistible nor inevitable.

The apartheid society of South Africa drew upon the centrality of patriarchy—that is, the concept of a society built upon the dominant role of men. Patriarchy largely shaped the 19th-century white European society that first established a colonial presence in the region. That patriarchal society created an archaic definition of masculinity centered on dated assumptions about manhood: Masculinity was defined by power.

At the center of The Smell of Apples is the developing relationship between a father and an only son, specifically how a father shapes that boy’s evolving conception of what it means to be a man. Indeed, when the Chilean general first meets young Marnus, he says, “And you are a carbon copy of your father” (35). Johan Erasmus comes across as a domineering presence. He is a committed career-military man—his world hinges on the assumption that might creates right.

In this world, real men do not think deep thoughts. Men do not give in to public displays of emotion. Men do not find delight in the arts. Men do not tend to domestic chores or to the business of childrearing. Marnus’s father is gruff and blunt in his opinions—this, he says, is right, and that is wrong—and outspoken in matters of discipline and protocol in how his household is to run. He demands the absolute and unconditional surrender of his wife’s individuality in the name of creating and sustaining his household. He disparages the rewards of education and the pursuit of the intellectual life as distracting and vaguely effeminate. He is at a loss to understand his radicalized daughter and her emerging liberalism, with its progressive social and cultural ideas.

Even as we see Marnus try to follow his father’s perspective, we see elements of the father’s view of masculinity as hypocritical. The father’s overexpression of machismo (as when he castigates Marnus for failing to land the huge shark) masks his own sexual depravity—the rape of Marnus’s friend exposes the father’s conception of might-makes-right masculinity as bogus. The ultimate price for this warped sense of manhood is paid by Marnus: As an adult, he embraces the military life and finds himself 20 years later fighting, and dying, in a hopeless and illegal war for a corrupt government that is itself teetering on collapse.