July's People

“No knock; but July, their servant, their host, bringing two pink glass cups of tea and a small tin of condensed milk, jaggedly-opened, specially for them, with a spoon in it.”

As the novel opens, its protagonists awaken in a doorless enclosure of mud walls, which is why the knock that typically begins their day doesn’t come: the first hint of the Smaleses’ eerily reduced circumstances. Other dissonant notes include the “jaggedly-opened” can of milk and a servant who is also their “host.” This host—July—is the first named character, which is fitting: Though the novel’s events unfold largely through the third-person perspective of Maureen and Bam Smales, their former servant moves the plot forward and is the most powerful figure in their lives.

“[B]elow her, beneath the iron bed on whose rusty springs they had spread the vehicle’s tarpaulin, a stamped mud and dung floor, above her, cobwebs stringy with dirt dangling from the rough wattle steeple that supported the frayed grey thatch. Stalks of light poked through.”

Both Maureen and Bam have lived “rough” before, but only on vacation, when they slept in rondavels—thatch-roofed, concrete-floored hovels that Bam’s Boer ancestors adapted from native huts. However, the hut’s dung floor and general untidiness indicate that it’s no holiday home, and the objects repurposed from a vehicle (seats, a tarpaulin) suggest desperate necessity rather than leisure.

“The vehicle was bought for pleasure, as some women are said to be made for pleasure. His wife pulled the face of tasting something that set her teeth on edge, when he brought it home. But he defended the dyed-blonde jauntiness; yellow was cheerful, it repelled heat.”

The Smaleses purchased their bakkie (pickup truck), their second car, for use on camping/hunting trips, signifying the couple’s (relative) wealth. Additionally, its “dyed-blonde” color, an analogy to pleasure-giving “women,” insinuates that for Bam, it embodies masculine, singularly sexual freedom. Significantly, its appropriation by another man (