The Smell of Apples

“I know that it’s one of the greatest commandments, never to take the name of the Lord in vain. It’s one of those sins where the punishment gets carried from one generation to the next. Even if you don’t take the name of the Lord in vain yourself, but your great grandfather did, you’ll still be punished for it.” 

What the novel explores is how for apartheid and Christianity coexisted. Here Marnus chastises Frikkie’s father for swearing. One can apply his logic, however, to the far greater sin of apartheid, which is similarly passed from one generation to the next. 

“One year we didn’t even see a single [whale] and then Jan said it was because the bay doesn’t belong to nature anymore. He says the bay has been taken over by the factories.” 

The novel explores the catastrophic impact of whites on the culture of black South Africa. By describing the exhaustion of the fisheries along False Bay, and particularly the loss of the magnificent whales that were part of the native folklore, Behr underscores how whites destroyed the world they colonized and how that trespass is a violation of nature. 

"Yet, something was missing, something of the passion and gravity with which we came to the defence force just a few years ago.” 

The perspective of the adult Marnus and his involvement in the military operations in southern Angola help clarify Behr’s argument that, over the decades of the later century, white South Africa gradually lost its enthusiasm for endorsing a social and political policy that had left the country a pariah. Here, Marnus wonders why the South African troops no longer fight with the same intensity and the same commitment. 

“‘And you are a carbon copy of your father.’” 

Marnus does not understand the comment by the Chilean general—Ilse has to explain to him later what a carbon copy is—but the reader understands early on that Marnus’s powerful allegiance to his father is shaping him.

“‘But I’ll read the real Moby-Dick—yours is only a revised edition for children.’ And when she said that I walked out of the room because I knew that nothing […] will ever get her to stop treating me like a baby.” 

Moby-Dick is a pivotal text here. Melville castigates Christianity for its simplicities; he denounces the Enlightenment for its pretense to understanding. Ilse’s reading of it has convinced her that her own country has abandoned complexity and embraced simplification, willing to see whites as good and blacks as bad, and willing to pretend to understand. Marnus is not ready for that revelation. He reads the children’s abridged version.

“‘A Volk that forgets its history is like a man without a memory. That man is useless.’” 

To the appreciative audience of his son, Johan summarizes the plight of Afrikaners. They are proud of their history, unable and unwilling to change, and uninterested in evolution of perception. History for Afrikaners is more a sentence, dooming that culture to embrace the toxic logic of apartheid in the name of defending as heroic the increasingly ironic presence of the Dutch in southern Africa. 

“[The Coloreds] are mostly alcoholics who booze up all their wages over weekends. Most often than not, they’re criminals who won’t ever get to see heaven. St. Peter, who stands at the portal of eternity, will pass out stone-cold when he smells their breath.” 

This racist assessment of Coloreds comes without irony and without apology from the narrator, a child who spews this racism as if such bigotry were a fact. 

“I found Doreen standing quietly in the passage, holding her rag and bucket in one hand, just listening to Mum’s voice fill the house.” 

This stunning moment, when the Erasmuses’ Colored housekeeper pauses to listen to Leonore’s contralto singing at the piano, mesmerized by the song, violates Marnus’s carefully taught assumptions that the Coloreds were lesser human beings, unable to feel deeply. 

“The longer I have [the racetrack set], the less fun it is to drive both cars myself. It’s much better when someone else drives one and we can race each other.” 

Marnus grows tired of his expensive birthday gift, a remote-control racecar track, because he controls both cars. There is no authentic excitement, no point to the action. Behr uses the remote-control racing set to suggest what Marnus is not ready to accept: The world works better within a dynamic—two forces of equal weight and equal value make for purposeful action. 

“Between soaping and washing our hair, Dad asks: ‘So tell Dad, does that little man of yours stand up yet sometimes in the mornings?’” 

The shattering revelation that Marnus’s father is a pedophile comes only at the novel’s end. As Marnus’s narrative unfolds, however, the father often acts inappropriately with his son. The two take long showers together and soap each other’s privates; they swim naked in the ocean surf; the father asks questions about Marnus’s public hair and the intensity of his morning urinations. These episodes lead us—but not Marnus—to accept the sodomizing of Frikkie as darkly logical. 

“‘Blood may still flow, but this country will be made safe for our children, even if it does cost our blood. As our forefathers trusted, let also us trust, O Lord. With our country and our people all will be well…because the Lord Almighty rules.’” 

This heated rhetoric, from the father’s speech during the centennial celebration of the composer of South Africa’s white national anthem, is recorded by Marnus, who is not entirely sure what it means. Still, he loves to see his father addressing crowds. The words reflect the father’s stubbornness, his determination to fight for apartheid, and his generation’s perception that their campaign to secure white South Africa was part of God’s unfolding providential plan. 

“I wonder if Ilse might really be in love with [the General]. These days she’s so full of weird and wonderful ideas that nothing will surprise me.” 

The most significant character evolution here is not Marnus—he remains locked within the claustrophobic logic of his father—but rather his older sister. Marnus does not understand the nature of her attraction to the Chilean General—Marnus is still pre-pubescent and girls are still abstract curiosities in school. The reader, however, sees the implications of her attraction to the General and how her decision to act on that attraction distinguishes her from her mother. 

“‘Every day of my life I drive around for your benefit. Every day of my life is sacrificed for your education in the best school. And yet, I get nothing in return from you. Not as a much as a thank you, dog.’” 

Like the title character from Henry Purcell’s opera Dido, Leonore is this narrative’s tragic center. Although Behr suggests that the poison of apartheid destroys all of the white characters in the novel, the lifelong sacrifice of Leonore’s passion, literally her voice, to accept her place within the patriarchal culture of South Africa is strikingly tragic. Her resentment smolders, corroding her self-respect and her dignity. When it surfaces, as it does here to a stunned Marnus, we realize the depth of her victimhood. 

“‘He beat you.’” 

In the surf off False Bay, Moby-Dick gets a restaging, with the father acting as a kind of stand-in for the crazy captain Ahab and Marnus acting as the hapless Ishmael, unable to land the great fish. In taunting his young son, and crushing his fragile ego (Marnus struggled with the fish until his body ached), the father reveals the heartlessness at the core of his personality—his disturbing belief that physical strength alone justifies merit and admiration. 

“Why didn’t he help me? If only he had helped me when the shark got close, I would never have lost him […] he left me standing here like a moron with the slack rod in front of the General.” 

This is a rare moment when the young narrator edges away from his fawning admiration for his father and questions the morality of his father’s actions. Shortly after Marnus has lost the shark after a fierce battle, he glimpses the malevolence and unfairness of his father’s personality. The glimpse does not, in the end, sustain Marnus’s evolution. The fish debacle is evidence he ultimately dismisses. 

“The best song Mum sings is ‘Remember Me.’ Ilse says it’s the last song Mum sang when she was Dido in the opera. Even though all the words are just ‘Remember me, Remember me,’ I like it best of all the songs Mum sang […] [W]hile she sang, the tears streamed down her cheeks.” 

We suspect that the beautiful Leonore either is having an affair that can go nowhere or had an affair that went nowhere. We are never entirely sure. “Dido’s Lament,” from Henry Purcell’s opera Dido, reveals the depth of Princess Dido’s emotional devastation at the loss of her lover, Aeneas, the Trojan prince. Despite its title, it is actually a song of resignation—Dido understands she will be forgotten by the dashing Prince. In this moment of honesty, the mother reveals her own lost soul, shedding tears her son cannot understand. Marnus responds to his mother’s singing but is unable to comprehend the implications of the lyric. 

“Tannie Karla answered she’d seen enough women who sacrifice everything for their husbands—even their minds. She’s seen enough of how Dad oppresses Mum to make sure she’d stay away from marriage.” 

The long war between sisters—Leonore and Karla—stems from this exchange, when the liberal (and unmarried) younger sister, Karla, caustically denounces her sister’s life of commonplace sacrifice and does so in front of a young Marnus. The truth cuts Leonore deeply—again, we see what Marnus does not. 

“Why are we educated to be afraid of people who think differently from us, who do differently from us, or who look different from us?” 

The passage comes from a long letter that Karla sends to her estranged sister, Marnus’s mother. The mother throws the letter away unopened, but Ilse picks it out from the trash, and the letter’s simple forthright directness becomes a primary factor in Ilse’s evolution away from the world of her family. 

 “‘And this 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. Whatever the cost.’” 

When Johan starts a diatribe to his family in the car coming back from a day trip, his son is mesmerized by the passion of his father’s statements. After delivering a skewed version of European colonization of South Africa, the father closes with an emphatic, and xenophobic, summation of the Afrikaner position, at once defiant and wrong-headed. 

“‘It’s not our place to ask why these things happen to us. It’s all the Lord’s will, and the best we can do is pray for Little-Neville to be healed.’” 

Leonore’s insensitive response to the horrors of the mob attack on Doreen’s 10-year-old son becomes the tipping point for Ilse’s rebellion. If Marnus does not react, Ilse does. She cannot accept her mother’s nonchalance about the implications of the attack and how the whites responsible for burning alive a small child will never face justice. After this moment, Ilse upends the school assembly by dishonoring the white South African national anthem. 

“‘We cannot understand what’s going on in her mind.’” 

The father cannot understand Ilse. For him, women go along, accept their place, and do not question. As Ilse moves to a position of emotional and psychological emancipation from her family, the father cannot grasp the logic of her liberalism, the moral rightness of her stand, or her willingness to resist rather than go along with the status quo that has given her family its wealth and privilege. 

“‘All these talents God has blessed you with—they’ll all be wasted if you can’t learn to do what society expects from you. It amounts to the same thing as hiding your candle under a bushel.’” 

Ilse could possibly liberate the mother, showing her the grave error in sacrificing her own singing gift to follow the conventions of white South African society. In this final exchange, however, we see the opposite will occur. Out of jealousy or spite, or because of her belief in the necessity of preserving the social order that imprisons her, the mother will try to destroy her own daughter’s movement toward emotional liberation and even references the New Testament to justify her advice. 

“‘You can learn all of this by walking through the museum and by just keep your eyes open. Open eyes are the gateways to an open mind.’”

This is from the conclusion of Marnus’s award-winning school essay about his trips through Cape Town’s National Museum. His advice—that wisdom comes only by keeping eyes open and the mind alert—creates irony, as we have seen Marnus again and again reject clear sight, opting not to see everything. We can infer from this passage that, as readers, we must accept that Marnus is a flawed and unreliable narrator.