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Review.
Mark Behr. The Smell of Apples. London. Abacus. 1995. 200 pages. L8.99. ISBN 0-349-10626-6.
Mark Behr's first novel in English, The Smell of Apples, is a version of the Afrikaans Die reuk van appels, which he published in 1993 (see WLT 67:4, p. 879). Whereas the Afrikaans edition was largely ignored, the new English version has drawn wide comment from critics and readers alike. This is a little surprising, since it is the Afrikaner establishment into which the book sinks its fangs.
The story has two loci. The first, which gets the fuller treatment, is the Cape Peninsula of 1973. This childhood narrative is intercut by the Angolan bush war of 1982. The narrator in both, Marnus Erasmus, is about ten years old in the early scenes.
The novel unfolds life in the heart of Afrikaner power at its height. The perspective is intimate and domestic. Marnus and Frikkie are friends at the school of the Afrikaner elite. Marnus's "Dad" is an army general; Frikkie's is a "big nob in SANLAM," the cornerstone of Afrikaner capital. The Erasmus family moved south from Tanganyika as that nation went black, and in 1973 they live on the False Bay coast. For the boys the terms of life are an idyll: fishing, swimming, cycling, teasing girls, and petty stealing--the stuff of untroubled youth.
In the home the patriarchy holds its power easily and generously. Family discipline, molded in faith and tradition, is deeply set and barely needs expression. Marnus, Dad's "little bull," knows and likes his place in it. He will be a general too when the time is right. But Dad is often busy. There is trouble in Mozambique, and he must "stay at the office"; also, he has a visitor in the house, a "mister Smith" who speaks Spanish. Beyond the high focus of the present-tense descriptions of the boys' world there is a slow, masked unfolding of the other terms on which the idyll depends. Mister Smith, it turns out not unexpectedly, is a Chilean general on a clandestine mission. Marnus is impressed.
Behr uses the brutal bush war to cut across this slow-moving, beautiful account of the children's lives, and on a first reading it begins to seem that the novel will come to rest on a simple set of contrasts: innocence, experience, nostalgia/reality, the Janus face of power, or some such variant. Much recent writing has in fact used this structure, but Behr has a deeper end in view. The goal for his mambalike poison is the heart of the whole life world.
In a somewhat contrived scene which involves the old ruse of the hole in the floorboards, Marnus is witness to the fact that the Chilean, and then Dad himself, first masturbate and then sodomize Frikkie. Grim as this is, it is not yet the last layer of moral knowledge. The final revelation is in the key exchange between Marnus and Frikkie. They have earlier sworn in blood a brotherhood oath of absolute honesty. But in the morning Frikkie refuses to tell him anything of the night's events. Marnus is shocked by what this means, about Dad and about his friendship with Frikkie, but he comes to see a way of saving the world as he has known it. If blood brother Frikkie does not tell him about the night, then he will keep the secret forever, and everyone will be safe. The family (and the Afrikaner nation) will hold its place and its power. This conclusion, as powerful as it is unexpected, is well grasped and placed. Intolerable knowledge is sealed and buried. Repression secures power.
Behr's novel presents the moment of repression as the truth of the modern Afrikaner psyche and its history. It is a powerfully made case. The underground linkages between the patriarchal summer idyll, the gross abuse, and the refusal of knowledge place a grim metaphor of corrupted power at the center of the Afrikaner world.
Marnus dies in Angola. As he lies wounded, his last sentences are: "I feel Dad's face against my chest and my arms around his head, and I feel safe. But now it is a different safety. Death brings its own freedom, and it is for the living that the dead should mourn, for in life there is no escape from history." But what is the import of this truth, and what does it tell us about the practice of fiction in the present time? At the level of realism, of what really happened inside Afrikaner power, the story has some strong claims to make. Paraguay's Stroessner certainly spent time staying incognito with an admiral and his family in Simonstown. Chileans and other right-wing international trash surely did the same. There were, moreover, for years rumors of a pedophile ring operating within the high command of the Defence Force. Eleven former generals are now arraigned before the Natal Supreme Court on charges of murder, and we do not need to understand their domestic arrangements to see the strength of Behr's metaphor. The political abuse is enough. In his public defense their leader, General Malan, argues that he is a Christian. "Dad" does the same. At the close of the novel he prays, asking God "to bless our country in 1974" and "strengthen the defence force," and a listening Marnus imagines "the Lord's hand resting over False Bay." The fangs really do go in deep.
At the level of fictional practice, however, The Smell of Apples poses some problems. It may well be the first exemplar of a new "autopsy" genre. Novels may begin their own "truth commission" procedure, and this may provide some popular satisfaction (as indeed Behr's story does); but it also brings a harder issue into view. From where, and in the name of whom, or what, are these truths spoken? Marnus the narrator dies. Who, then, is the author, and from where does his authority come? What discourse sustains Behr? He is silent on the question, but there is the implication of some other open ground, beyond, or apart from, repression (in both its political and its psychological meanings), from which the story can be told. South Africans are uneasy in the face of such claims. "Freedom," they have already found, is also a mixed thing.
Tony Morphet
University of Cape Town
Copyright University of Oklahoma Winter 1996