cover image The Smell of Apples

The Smell of Apples

Mark Behr. St. Martin's Press, $21.95 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-312-13604-8

``The dreams of the parents become the dreams of the children,'' observes Marnus Erasmus, the 10-year-old son of an affluent white South African family of the early 1970s. The irony behind his remark lies at the heart of this moving and tragic first novel, whose innocent narrator provides the perfect lens through which to view a culture in decay and self-denial. A boy who enjoys fishing and playing with his grade-school friends, Marnus lives in a beautiful house with his mother, a former musician, and his father, the youngest-ever major-general in the South African Defence Force. But doubts, many mirroring the unpleasant realities of South Africa itself, begin to burrow at the foundation of this seemingly idyllic life. The young son of the family's servant is severely burned by white men; Marnus's beloved aunt is exiled from the family for espousing ``liberal'' views, while his sister, Ilse, threatens to follow in her footsteps; a visit from a Chilean general inadvertently reveals to Marnus the moral rot within his own parents' marriage. Perfectly controlled and powerfully realistic, this novel is underwritten in the most positive sense: Behr creates a situation so potent that the characters seem to indict themselves. And yet the reader retains sympathy for Marnus, a boy just beginning to understand the horror around him and, in italicized passages seeded throughout the narrative, a man facing death 15 years later on the battlefields of Angola. (Sept.)