The Smell of Apples

The Smell of Apples, the first novel by South African writer Mark Behr, was originally published in 1993 in Afrikaner, before being published in English translation in 1995 to international acclaim. It won numerous prestigious literary prizes, most notably the M-Net Literary Award for best South African novel; the Betty Trask Award for best first novel published in the British Commonwealth; and the Art Seidenbaum Award for best English-language first novel, presented by The Los Angeles Times. Mark Behr, who was born in 1963 and died in 2015, emerged as one of the most important voices in the generation of South African writers who grew up in the last decades of apartheid. Given the novel’s controversial look at the impact of apartheid on South Africa’s white children, Behr initially struggled to find a publisher. Two years after his death, The Smell of Apples debuted as a one-actor drama, playing to sold-out houses throughout South Africa and winning a number of important awards for its actor, Gideon Lombard.

Plot Summary

The narrator of The Smell of Apples is 11-year-old Marnus Erasmus, a white Afrikaner living in Cape Town, South Africa. Although his recollections allow his narrative to span several significant memories from his childhood, the narrative takes place largely over the last weeks of 1973, as Marnus prepares for the approaching summer holidays. His family is well off: His father, Johan, is a career Army officer, his mother, Leonore, a retired opera singer. His older sister, Ilse, is among the most respected and promising students in their school. Her emerging liberal political views, however, are becoming a source of tension in the family.

Marnus worships his father—his aggressive nature, his no-nonsense bluntness, and his sheer physical presence. Marnus’s narrative of his day-to-day experiences, however, reflects his unthinking embrace of his parents’ deep-seated racist views against the blacks in South Africa. Decades earlier, the father’s own family was driven out of nearby Tanzania by blacks and lost rich farmlands in the family for generations. Now whites in South Africa face the same threat. Although Marnus recounts only positive experiences with “Coloreds,” or mixed-race people (most notably, Doreen, the family’s long-time maid), he accepts without question his parents’ distrust, fear, and paranoia against blacks.

The father brings home a Chilean general as a house guest. Although Marnus does not understand this, the reader surmises that the General is visiting to advise the father on handling insurgent resistance through torture and imprisonment. In listening to conversations over dinner, Marnus hears that South Africa has been isolated from the international community and now must address the race problem on its own.

Frikkie Delport, Marnus’s closest friend, comes to stay with the family in the last few days before the General departs and the family leaves for a holiday. Marnus is fascinated by the General, and as the visit draws to a close, he hopes to take one last look at a jagged white scar on the General’s back. Spying on the General in the guest room, Marnus is puzzled to see what he believes is his sister on the edge of the General’s bed and the General standing over her in his underwear.

The next night, the General’s last, Marnus hears odd noises from the guest room. He again looks into the General’s room and this time sees his own father sodomizing Frikkie. Although he tries to talk to Frikkie the next day, the friend says nothing and wants only to go home. Marnus, unsure of what he actually saw, prepares to depart with his family for their holiday.

Nearly 20 years later, Marnus is a lieutenant in the South African army. His platoon is part of his nation’s clandestine operations in neighboring Angola, waged against Communist rebels and aided by Cuba. The South African campaign is disorganized, and the Afrikaner troops, including Marnus, are exhausted and demoralized. Marnus is mortally wounded in an early morning mortar attack carried out by Cubans in an attempt to cripple a hydroelectric dam near the town of Calueque.

Chapter Summaries and Analyses

The Smell of Apples has no chapter divisions, nor is it sectioned into parts. The novel is presented as a single, seamless first-person memory narrative recounted by a young white boy, Marnus Erasmus, who lives in Cape Town, South Africa, in the early 1970s. That recollection is interspersed periodically by the narration, set in italics, of a grown Marnus, now a lieutenant in the South African army and serving as part of a clandestine expeditionary force sent to Angola by the white South African government.