In his account of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century South African Cape, William Beinart writes that ‘[m]asculinity is a slippery concept … because it is difficult to distinguish from class and race.’ The apartheid South African Cape of the 1970s, the setting of Mark Behr's The Smell of Apples, is likewise a slippery staging ground for masculinities dependent upon discursive constructions of such aspects of identity as race and class, constructions that attempt to solidify a particular hegemonic South African masculinity (white, Christian, militaristic) while also determining the signifiers of others. When Robert Morrell notes that the diminutive ‘boy’ is an example of how ‘the relationship between white coloniser and black colonised involved emasculation,’ he offers evidence for how such verbal castration, consistent with the prominence of discourse in even a material practice as visceral as sexual violence, can inspire, facilitate, or otherwise prop up instances of literal castration and other forms of sexual violence. In the rhetorical moves it makes to implicate racial oppression with sexualized violence, Behr's novel reveals the importance of racial imagery to apartheid South Africa's hegemonic masculinity and depicts the material practices that produce such hegemony. Specifically, the novel illustrates how same-sex, same-race, pedophilic desire can be redeployed in the services of imagining lower-class and non-white races as amenable to colonial subjugation.

Behr's novel, first published in Afrikaans in 1993 (as Die reuk van appels) and translated in 1995, has won numerous awards, and along with works such as Marlene van Niekerk's Triomf (1994) and Zakes Mda's Ways of Dying (1995), forms a prominent cornerstone of post-apartheid literature.