FICTION

THE SMELL OF APPLES by Mark Behr (St. Martin’s Press: $21.95; 200 pp.) Apples smell sweetest when they have begun to rot, and the life of the Erasmus family in the South Africa of the 1970s is nothing if not fragrant. Handsome Dad is the army’s youngest major general. Beautiful Mum is a former opera singer who gave up her career for love and family. Sister Ilse is an honor student. Eleven-year-old Marnus, the narrator of Mark Behr’s first novel, swims and fishes with his friend Frikke on the beaches of False Bay near their affluent suburb of Cape Town.

Behr makes good use of Marnus’ naive voice. He believes that he’s having a nice, normal childhood, but we see him slowly being fed the poison of apartheid in sugar-coated pills. That some of the niceness is genuine only compounds the tragedy of an Afrikaner minority having to wall itself off from more and more of the rest of the world--even dissident relatives--to preserve its self-image as good, Christian people.

Meanwhile, the novel fast-forwards 15 years to an adult Marnus fighting in a grinding covert war against Cuban mercenaries in Angola. His voice has become sad and cynical. The spirit-breaking event in his past proves to have been a week in 1973 when his father played host to one of a series of incognito visitors from the West. This one was a Chilean general fresh from the Pinochet coup. Spying on them through knotholes in the ceiling, Marnus got a chilling glimpse of Dad’s dark side. Behr adds a revelation of sexual abuse, with Frikke as victim, that hardly seems necessary after the success of his more subtle ironies.