Opening Page
The opening page sets the template for the narrative to come. Almost every single chapter of the novel begins or very shortly commences to demonstrate an exuberance of imagery. This is pure imagery untethered to specific subjects, but existing almost as if disconnected from specific subjects. The imagery sets the stage for the chapter’s exploration of themes or concepts or broad-based topics of concern to the narrative:
“Colour explodes. Green, yellow, red and blue. Sleepy-eyed women are walking among sunflowers. Naked women are chasing white doves among sunflowers. True atonement of rhythm and line. A boy is riding a donkey backwards among sunflowers. The ground is red. The sky is blue. The boy is red."
Johannes Smit
Imagery is used to extraordinary effect throughout the novel and it is certainly not in every case as glorious celebratory at that above. Johannes Smit is the antagonist, a truly vile villain if ever there was one. Within a page or two of being introduced, imagery is used in a move unexpected way: to describe his sexual perversions and the failures to perform therein:
“Intense heat sucked out his slimy seed before he could penetrate her. He cursed his pipe as it leaked all over her. He damned its sudden limpness. He just lay there like a plastic bag full of decaying tripe on top of her. She heaved him off her body and jumped up. She grabbed her skirt and ran like a tornado, destroying a swathe of sunflowers in her wake.”
Setting
Imagery also becomes a powerful tool for delineating the class differences within the social structure of the world these characters inhabit. One need not even know for sure what certain terms mean in the following example in order to interpret the context in order to understand where on the social spectrum a character living here occupies:
“It was an RDP house, of the Reconstruction and Development Programme. Four tiny rooms. Two bedrooms, one lounge and one kitchen. A small concrete stoop at the front door. Grey walls of slightly roughcast cement blocks. Corrugated-iron roof Big burglar-proofed windows on both sides of the varnished pine door. A small garden in front and a small garden at the back. Four strands of loose barbed wire on three sides of the yard, separating the RDP house. No fence in the front.”
A Minister’s Best Friend
Ah, to be a fictional minister in the Christian church, bound to be tempted and bound to give in, but no worries because the job comes with a built-in get-out-of-trouble-free card. And the Reverend Francois Bornman is well-versed in the jumps and hoops required to put that card to good use:
“The devil had sent black women to tempt him and to move him away from the path of righteousness. The devil had always used the black female to tempt the Afrikaner. It was a battle that was raging within individual Afrikaner men. A battle between lust and loathing. A battle that the Afrikaner must win. The devil made the Afrikaner to covertly covet the black woman while publicly detesting her. It was his fault that he had not been strong enough to resist the temptation. The devil made him do it. The devil had weakened his heart, making it open to temptation.”
