July's People

The novel’s themes of societal upheaval, sudden transformations, and personal rebirth draw on imagery that analogizes its action to passages from scripture and/or liturgical rite, underscoring its momentous, almost miraculously life-changing events. The brutal civil war that upends South African society, ending centuries of white rule and emptying the cities of their Caucasian populations, has the (uncanny) suddenness and devastation of an apocalypse or the Biblical flood. Looking back on her family’s frantic exodus from a burning Johannesburg, Maureen reflects that “it was all a miracle; and one ought to have known, from the sufferings of saints, that miracles are horror” (11).

Shepherding the Smaleses’ narrow escape, their Black servant, July, steps into the role of a Noah or Moses, guiding them through a hostile wasteland to shelter: the remote, pastoral enclave where his extended family lives. Maureen spends “three days and nights hidden on the floor of the [escape] vehicle” (3), alluding to the biblical figures of Jonah and Lazarus, both of whom lay “buried” for that exact span of time: Jonah in the belly of a whale, Lazarus in his grave. Maureen’s salvation, then, is a symbolic resurrection into a new life—albeit one partly of “horror,” which upends her world and even her understanding of her past life.