The Age of Iron (Situational Irony)
The novel takes its title from Hesiod, which aligns with Curren's background in the classics; however, she's not the first one in the novel to bring up this metaphor of iron. Florence describes Bheki and his comrades as being "like iron" (50) and Curren finds the metaphor to be unsettling. However, just a few days later, Curren finds herself describing her own child to Vercueil as being "like iron" (75), and then Vercueil applies the same description to her. The irony here is twofold. First, it's ironic that Curren applies Florence's terminology to her white, middle-class experience of motherhood after criticizing Florence for the very same terminology. It is also ironic that Curren doesn't understand, still, that she, too, is of the "age of iron"—as a beneficiary of apartheid, she is as much forged by the "iron" of 20th-century South Africa as is Bheki and John.
Putting It All Behind Her (Verbal Irony)
In Part 2, as Curren considers all the factionalism that led South Africa to its current state of unrest, she writes to her daughter, "How fortunate you are to have put all this behind you!" (51) There is, in this statement, a tinge of sarcasm, or verbal irony, in the fact that Curren's daughter left South Africa with the intention of divesting herself from the cruelties of apartheid—in this statement, Curren passively alludes to the luxury and privilege that allowed her daughter to leave in the first place, privileges afforded to her by apartheid.
Role Reversal (Situational Irony)
At the beginning of the novel, Curren finds Vercueil sleeping under cardboard boxes in her yard. She invites him in and makes him a sandwich, offers him coffee and "a job of work" (8), all of which he boldly declines. He pours the coffee out, throws the sandwich to the dog, and when Curren tells him he's wasting his life, he spits at her feet. By the end of the novel, Vercueil is living in Curren's room, and he's making food for her, coming as close to a caregiver as his character ever could, and watching over Curren in her final weeks of life.
Thucydides (Situational Irony)
When Curren visits John in the hospital, she urges him to abandon his cause and focus on school. She tells John that if he were to take her Thucydides class, he "might have learned something about what can happen to our humanity in a time of war. Our humanity, that we are born with, that we are born into" (80). Ironically, Curren misses the point here—John knows better than she what it means to lose one's humanity in a time of war, because as long as apartheid remains a policy, it declares war on the humanity of non-white South Africans. John is part of a struggle to end that war and reclaim humanity.
