book review the promise by damon galgut

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Ella fox-martens, the promise, by damon galgut, reviewed by ella fox-martens.

Somewhere in apartheid Pretoria, 1985, Rachel Swart, a recently re-converted Jewish woman, dies of cancer. On her deathbed, she feverishly forces her Christian, Afrikaans husband to promise to give the maid, Salome, the house where she already lives. Despite its illegality— Black people could not own property at the time —the conversation is overheard by Rachel’s teenage daughter Amor, who spends the next thirty years attempting to convince her father and two siblings to make good on her mother’s dying wish. 

So goes the setup of Damon Galgut’s Man Booker Award–winning novel The Promise , which is much less about the Swarts, and much more about deconstructing the place where such a story could feasibly be told. “Do you have no idea what country you’re living in?” Amor’s brother asks her. “No,” Galgut answers for us, “she doesn’t … history has not yet trod on her.” By the time The Promise ends in 2018, history will have ground its boot not only on Amor and her family, but the entire nation. Galgut, though– whom I interviewed in 2021 –welcomes the death of the old South Africa, which allows him to consider the central question of what grows out of its ashes.

Each of The Promise ’s four sections centers around the death of a different Swart. They’re also set in defining eras of South African politics, from the State of Emergency to Mandela’s presidency, Mbeki’s inauguration and Jacob Zuma’s eventual resignation. The romp through South Africa’s sordid past is a bizarre one, populated by impossible coincidences and brutal violence, with a chorus of odd supporting characters: a case of snakes, an incestuous priest, a yoga teacher called Mowgli, an evil reptile park salesman. 

The Promise ’s sweeping scope and utilization of quasi-magical realism to evoke the dysfunction of life in postcolonial states renders it closer to Midnight’s Children than Coetzee’s Disgrace . There is a neat strangeness to the proceedings that suggests a fable; Amor herself gets struck by lightning as a child. It’s a risky approach, given that apartheid and its consequences are raw enough for this kind of fictionalization to feel condescending. Yet, from a distance, the last thirty years—with the absurd scandals, dashed hopes, and constant corruption—do seem like a staged tragedy. After all, it was Jane Taylor’s 1998 play Ubu and the Truth Commission , with its puppets and talking crocodile, that emerged as one of the most painful artistic representations of racist violence under apartheid. The decision to open the novel with a Fellini quote is then eminently sensible. Disdaining unflinching realism as a sufficient vehicle for conveying the weight of history, The Promise instead offers a narrative that is only matched in surrealism by the facts themselves. In South Africa, Galgut implies, art can only ever hope to imitate life.

Even more polarizing is Galgut’s knowingly theatrical voice, which is unsurprising given his background as a playwright. Thoughts swirl around on the page, their origins unclear. Rachel’s ghost floats off to evaluate her own dead body before she is swiftly excised on grounds of unimportance. Galgut’s direction is ever-present, intruding upon events to offer moral judgements, or to muddy the waters until objective truth is blurred. “The family has returned,” he writes, “or maybe they have never left.” He picks people up and sets them down again. Perhaps they were in the living room, or the lounge. Amor left on a Tuesday, or a Wednesday, either in the evening or morning. As he notes, whatever actually happens “doesn’t matter.” Galgut implicates the reader with his frequent asides. “Shall we say” and “let us pretend” have the effect of rapping on the glass of an aquarium to startle the fish. The intention that underlies Galgut’s chaotic narration is simple: The reader must never become comfortable enough to forget that this is a story. Galgut’s refusal to allow suspension of disbelief strips the machinations of fiction bare, revealing people as symbols and place as setting—drawing constant attention to the ugly wiring that sustains personal and national propaganda.

What saves The Promise from being an exercise in history is its pitch-black sense of humor. Galgut even manages to force a genuine laugh during a murder scene with his stinging depiction of “South Africa’s finest”—two corrupt and incompetent detectives, one of whom is a little too happy to be examining a body. His ability to eviscerate racist, bourgeois white South Africans is unparalleled:

Astrid huffs audibly. Since she married a rich man, she finds the notion of work distasteful, especially when it’s a job. Running a house and raising a family is bad enough, but that’s why you have servants, to help you. It seems to Astrid that her little sister has chosen the life of a servant instead, and what for? To punish herself?

This is Galgut’s wisest stylistic choice. Without the embrace of satire, The Promise would never work as well as it does. When it comes to apartheid fiction by white writers, earnest sentimentality can reduce an otherwise competent novel into a spectacle of pearl-clutching and exploitation, placing white guilt above Black experience. Galgut never falls into that trap, mostly because he is always aware of his characters as devices. 

Yes, as others have noted , Salome is barely developed—nobody is. As Amor journeys home for the last time, having devoted her life to serving others out of a misguided sense of martyrdom, she proves herself incapable of seeing Salome (or Black people at large) as anything other than the answer to her own problems of conscience. Decades have passed, and Salome is an old woman now. As her son Lukas makes clear, it’s “thirty years too late” to be grateful for anything. Amor’s supposedly noble resolution to keep Rachel’s promise has always been self-serving. Without her guilt, she barely exists. Her peaceful ruminations on her own death sum up Galgut’s core idea elegantly: “Other branches will fill the space,” he writes. “Other stories will write themselves over yours, scratching out every word.” Like a cauterized wound, the Swarts and the South Africa they represent need to die for the new country to decide its own future. With that hope, Galgut ends The Promise on a wistful note as Amor climbs down from the roof, having just scattered her brother’s ashes. She descends towards a fragile blank slate, where the past must be laid to rest in order to survive whatever happens next.

Published on March 17, 2022

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THE PROMISE

by Damon Galgut ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 6, 2021

Galgut extends his extraordinary corpus with a rich story of family, history, and grief.

Three decades of South African sociopolitical history are woven into a saga of loss and missed opportunity that upends a dysfunctional Afrikaner family living outside Pretoria.

Rachel Swart has just died of cancer. Her husband, Manie, and three children, Anton, Astrid, and Amor, are all walloped by different incarnations of grief. Only Amor, the youngest daughter, cares about her mother’s dying wish—that Salome, the Swarts’ domestic servant, receive full ownership of the house where she lives with her family, though under apartheid law, Black people are not legally allowed to own property in White areas. Nobody else pays any mind: Amor is 13 years old at the start and functionally voiceless in her family. The promise is buried along with Rachel, only to be unearthed years later when subsequent family deaths force the Swarts to recollide for the rituals of mourning. Galgut moves fluidly among accounts of every single major and minor character, his prose unbroken by quotation marks or italics, as though narrated from the perspective of a ghost who briefly possesses every person. The language is peppered with regional geography, terminology, and slang, with sentences ranging from clipped (“One day, she says aloud. One day I’ll. But the thought breaks off midway…”) to lyrical (“There’s a snory sound of bees, jacaranda blossoms pop absurdly underfoot”) to metafictional (“No need to dwell on how she washes away her tears”). Galgut’s multifarious writing style is bold and unusual, providing an initial barrier to entry yet achieving an intuitive logic over time. “How did it become so complicated?” Amor wonders at one point. “Home used to mean only one Thing, not a blizzard of things at war.”

Pub Date: April 6, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-60945-658-0

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Europa Editions

Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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Still more brilliant escapism among Kwan’s 1 percenters. Too much is never enough.

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Pub Date: May 21, 2024

ISBN: 9780385546294

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024

GENERAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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Damon Galgut Wins Booker Prize for ‘The Promise’

The novelist, shortlisted for two of his previous books, received one of the world’s most prestigious literary awards for his cutting depiction of a white family in post-apartheid South Africa.

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By Alexandra Alter

When the South African writer Damon Galgut learned that his novel, “ The Promise ,” was shortlisted for the Booker Prize , he was filled with anxiety. Galgut had been shortlisted twice before, in 2003 and 2010, and both times, the stress of the nominations “probably shaved a few years off my life.”

“For a few weeks, you’re one of six winners, then all that attention gets sucked away and very, very suddenly, there’s only one winner, the rest of you are losers,” he told the Guardian in an interview in September.

This year was different. On Wednesday, the Booker judges pronounced Galgut the winner, praising his novel for its “unusual narrative style that balances Faulknerian exuberance with Nabokovian precision, pushes boundaries, and is a testament to the flourishing of the novel in the 21st century.”

At the awards ceremony in London, when he was asked how it felt to be named the winner, Galgut, 57, appeared more stunned than happy. “You’d better ask me that tomorrow, because my nerves have kind of gone numb,” he said. “I truly didn’t expect to be standing here.”

“The Promise,” Galgut’s ninth book, had already won acclaim among critics for its menacing and bleakly funny portrait of the Swart family, descendants of Dutch settlers who are desperately holding onto their farm and status in post-apartheid South Africa. Literary critics likened his experimental prose to modernist masters like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and William Faulkner, while others noted his debt to fellow South African writer J.M. Coetzee.

A review of “The Promise” in The New York Times Book Review called Galgut “a gleeful satirist, mordantly skewering his characters’ fecklessness and hypocrisy.”

Galgut got the idea for the novel, which Europa Editions published in the United States in April, from a conversation with a friend, who described going to a series of funerals for family members. It sounded like the perfect narrative vehicle for a family saga. Galgut began working on a novel centered on a family — “just an ordinary bunch of white South Africans,” he writes — whose matriarch dies of cancer in 1986, when South Africa was convulsing with political unrest. The novel’s title refers both to the unrealized promise of social equality after the end of apartheid, and to the matriarch’s promise to leave a house to a Black servant, Salome, which causes a rift in the family.

He set the novel in Pretoria, where he grew up, in part to explore the region’s dark history of apartheid and racial violence and the impact that had on his childhood.

In a phone interview after the ceremony, Galgut said he wanted to explore the post-apartheid period to document what it felt like to live through its hopes and disappointments. He did not want to tell a moralistic tale of heroes and oppressors, or to offer some kind of collective catharsis that revealed a path forward for the country.

“I’m skeptical of the claim that novels change the world. I really don’t believe that,” he said. “Novels tell you how it feels to be alive at a particular moment in history. I see them more as a record than as an agent of change.”

“I know some novelists and some critics might perceive that as a failing in my work,” Galgut continued. “They believe novelists are meant to point the moral way forward, but I feel very uncomfortable in that role, to be honest.”

While much of the narrative in “The Promise” unfolds in earlier decades, its themes — the legacy of colonialism and apartheid, and questions about who belongs — are still painfully resonant in his country, he said. “The topic of land, who owns it, who used to own it, who is going to own it in the future, that topic is very central to South African political life now.”

“The Promise” was one of six shortlisted novels and stood out for its artistry and scope, judges said.

“This is a book about inheritance and legacy,” Maya Jasanoff, the chair of the 2021 judges, said in a news conference on Wednesday. “It’s a book that invites reflection over the decades.”

American authors once again dominated the shortlist this year, accounting for three of the finalists. They were Richard Powers for “ Bewilderment ,” Maggie Shipstead for “ Great Circle ,” and Patricia Lockwood for “No One Is Talking About This.”

The other authors were the Sri Lankan writer Anuk Arudpragasam for “ A Passage North ,” about the lingering trauma from his country’s civil war, and the British and Somali novelist Nadifa Mohamed for “The Fortune Men,” about a Somali man falsely accused of murder in Wales.

The Booker Prize is awarded annually to the best novel written in English and published in Britain or Ireland, and was selected this year from 158 submitted novels. Last year, the award went to Douglas Stuart for “Shuggie Bain,” his autobiographical debut novel about growing up in Scotland with an alcoholic mother. In 2019, breaking with tradition, the prize was awarded jointly to Bernardine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood.

Since 2014 , the prize has been open to any novel written in English and published in Britain. Previously, it was limited to writers from Britain, Ireland, Zimbabwe and the Commonwealth.

Galgut is the third writer from South Africa to win the Booker, following Nadine Gordimer and Coetzee, who has won twice. Galgut began writing at a young age, and fell in love with books as a child, when he was bedridden with lymphoma and family members read to him to keep him occupied.

He published his debut novel, “A Sinless Season,” in 1982, when he was just 17. His novel “ The Good Doctor ,” published in England in 2003, was shortlisted for the Booker that year and won the Commonwealth Writers Prize. He made the Booker shortlist again in 2010 for “ In A Strange Room ,” a novel about an alienated South African traveler named Damon, which straddled the line between fiction and memoir and prompted a debate over whether it should be eligible for a fiction prize.

After bracing himself for another disappointment, Galgut was astonished to have finally won and unsettled about the onslaught of attention, he said.

“I don’t really know what lies ahead,” he said. “I kind of dread my lack of ability to rise to the occasion. My instincts are to shrink and protect myself.”

Alexandra Alter writes about publishing and the literary world. Before joining The Times in 2014, she covered books and culture for The Wall Street Journal. Prior to that, she reported on religion, and the occasional hurricane, for The Miami Herald. More about Alexandra Alter

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The Promise by Damon Galgut review — our verdict on the 2021 Booker winner

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“One of the world’s great writers,” Edmund White trumpets on the cover of the South African author Damon Galgut’s The Promise . This is no exaggeration. If there’s a better run of three novels in English this century than Galgut’s The Good Doctor (2003), The Impostor (2008) and In a Strange Room (2010), I want to know about them. But even great writers have off-days, and his last novel, Arctic Summer (2014), about EM Forster, was a bit flat.

He’s back on home turf with The Promise , a family saga in South Africa from 1986 to 2018 that crams so much into 300 pages that there must be secret trapdoors involved. As that suggests, Galgut is an ambitious writer but he’s too considerate to

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‘How do you give up privilege?’: Damon Galgut on his Booker-winning novel

In The Promise, Galgut chronicles the decline of post-apartheid South Africa through four funerals over 40 years

“I ’m used to not winning – that’s kind of what I’m programmed for, and what I’m braced for,” says the quietly spoken South African novelist Damon Galgut, the morning after he was awarded the Booker prize for his ninth novel, The Promise. He has been shortlisted twice before: in 2003 for The Good Doctor, and in 2010 for In a Strange Room . He finds the whole thing “deeply disquieting” (his mother has helpfully given his contact details to journalists back in South Africa). The ceremony last night felt totally unreal, he says, “as if I’d been hit over the head. Obviously it was a great night for the book, so it is hard to be displeased with that.”

Slight in person (he’s a committed yogi), the 57-year-old author is serious and courteous in conversation, but the sardonic voice of the novel’s shapeshifting, puckish narrator clearly belongs to him. Written in an innovative style, The Promise tells the story of a white South African family through the device of four funerals over 40 years, chronicling the decline of post-apartheid South Africa. It might be more JM Coetzee than Richard Curtis, but Galgut’s Four Funerals is surprisingly funny. (The family are called Swarts, which means “black” in Afrikaans, “a sort of in-joke”, as he puts it). With the exception of a recent “ beating ” in the London Review of Books, the novel has been rapturously received. “A surprising number of novelists are very good; few are extraordinary,” began one critic , just warming up.

The conceit of telling the story through a series of funerals came to him after a boozy lunch in which a friend “entertained” him with anecdotes about a succession of family funerals: “Oblique angles appeal to me.” The conflict of “the promise” on which the novel rests – the dying wish of the mother that her black servant, Salome, be given the rights to the tiny dilapidated house in which she has lived on the family farm for years – was also inspired by a friend whose family, like the fictional Swarts, “in time-honoured white South African style”, found ways to not follow through on a similar pledge.

The idea of broken promises runs neatly throughout the novel, which opens in 1986 and ends in 2018. Four funerals, roughly four decades apart, in recent South African history also means four presidents. “Like everyone else, I was incredibly excited at the movement from the dark days of PW Botha to the excitement of the golden Mandela era, although there was always something a bit unreal about that,” he says. “Then into the much more ambiguous terrain of Mbeki’s time and into the catastrophe of Zuma’s reign.”

He didn’t set out to make any sort of political statement, intending the national mood to work as “a sort of background wallpaper”, taking in the 1995 Rugby World Cup, HIV, a rise in violent crime and the impact of climate change. But there’s no denying the novel’s downward trajectory. “The sense of promise that we had in 1994 was palpable. And that promise has pretty much dissipated,” he says. “We are not in a great place right now.”

Nearly all the characters fail to live up to their promise, in particular Anton, a writer, who, like the author, grew up in Pretoria around the same time. “Apartheid was set up to serve somebody like Anton,” Galgut says. “Without any effort he could have stepped into the shoes of privilege and power. I think that promise has probably faded for white males in South Africa, which is not a terrible thing.”

His otherworldly sister, Amor, is determined to make sure their mother’s legacy is honoured. Their disagreement reflects the predicament facing white South Africans: “Her solution is to renounce her inheritance, which I guess is a way, but is that a solution for South Africa?” he asks. “How do you give up your privilege? There’s no way you can hand it in, like at a cloakroom.” Brother and sister represent the two sides of his own conflicted psyche, torn between “being self-interested and not averse to the trappings of power and more saintly impulses to renounce it”.

Despite being haunted by death, decay and disappointment, the novel was “great fun” to write. While the spirits of Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner loom large, so, too, does Fellini, who provides the book’s epigraph. Stymied during earlier drafts, Galgut took a break to write a film script, a tip he’d recommend for anyone suffering writer’s block. “Language is the least important element in the film,” he says. “No one cares, which is strangely helpful, because you have to take language terribly seriously if you are a novelist.” Instead he discovered “the free-ranging eye of the camera which can go anywhere inside a scene”.

The only place we don’t go is into the mind of Salome, “invisible” to those around her. This silence is deliberate. “Somebody like Salome still has no voice in modern South Africa,” he says. “And that, in many ways, is at the heart of South Africa’s problems right now.”

In his New Yorker review , James Wood argued that The Promise is more pessimistic than Coetzee’s Disgrace, which won the Booker prize in 1999 and takes some beating as a bleak portrait of post-apartheid South Africa. Without wanting to engage in any “pessimism competition”, it is true that Galgut can’t remember ever feeling so despairing of the future. Government corruption during the pandemic has pushed the nation “over the edge into some unknown terrain”, he believes. “We are used to the idea of politicians stealing, but politicians stealing in a situation like this seemed absolutely morally bankrupt and I think it has left the country financially bankrupt.”

The eldest of four children, Galgut and his family led “an ordinary suburban existence” in Pretoria, which he describes as a “sort of nerve centre of the whole apartheid machine – not a great place to grow up”. But when he was six he nearly died of a kind of lymphoma that typically affects black children, which meant it wasn’t diagnosed until he was in a comatose state.

His recovery turned him into something of a “medical miracle, always being wheeled out for doctors conferences and so on”, which he blames for his anxiety in public spaces. “I felt a little bit like that last night on stage, as if I was a medical specimen again,” he confesses. But he credits the long months of being read to – “there were no phones or videos” – during his convalescence with making him a writer. “I developed a passionate love for stories and from there it was just a short step to wanting to create them myself.” By high school he had written two “ terribly bad novels”, which became his first novel A Sinless Season, published when he was just 17. “It kind of embarrasses me now.”

Today Galgut lives on his own in Cape Town, a “quiet life” which he enjoys and hopes will continue largely unchanged. “I guess, in some way, we think that our life holds some promise which may or may not come to fulfilment. It usually doesn’t,” he reflects of his characters. Winning the Booker, 40 years after his first novel was published, and on his third nomination, the author has surely fulfilled his own promise.

This article was amended on 6 November 2021. Galgut’s first novel was published 40, not 50, years before he won the Booker prize, and the Rugby World Cup was hosted by South Africa in 1995, not 1994 as stated in an earlier version.

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The Promise

by Damon Galgut

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Winner of the 2021 Booker Prize, The Promise chronicles post-apartheid South Africa through the lens of one family's decline.

Damon Galgut's Booker Prize-winning novel, The Promise , opens with a death; Rachel Swart is leaving behind her husband Manie and their three children. As she lays dying, she insists Manie give her long-time maid, Salome, the Lombard place, a ramshackle house on their property in which the servant has lived most of her life. Manie tearfully promises to do so, a pledge witnessed solely by their youngest child, 13-year-old Amor. Later, Manie denies the scene ever occurred, reneging on his oath. The unfulfilled promise remains a sore point for the next 30 years, becoming a topic of debate every time the family is gathered, which only occurs during funerals over the ensuing decades. Galgut's plot serves as an allegory for post-apartheid South Africa, with the unfulfilled promise from the Swart family, who are white, to Salome, who is Black, mirroring what the author sees as a failed promise of reparations made to the nation's Black citizens. The Swart family's decline parallels that of the country, as corruption and moral failures keep the powerless from obtaining what they're rightfully owed. Despite the novel's relatively weighty theme, the book doesn't read like its subject is a heavy one; it's only after pondering the subtext that it becomes apparent that its ultimate message is somewhat pessimistic. Indeed, it's actually pretty funny at times, partially due to Galgut's brilliant depiction of the incredibly dysfunctional Swart family, all of whom, apart from Amor, are unlikeable to one degree or another. They engender no sympathy in the reader, making it easier to laugh at their failings. The truly outstanding feature of this novel, though, is its narrator, who sometimes seems to be omniscient, and at other times feigns ignorance or admits to imagining whole scenes: "Although it's too soon to have [the deed], let's say that she does, let's say the lawyer drew up the document this morning and gave it to her, so there it is, right in front of your eyes, she has the paper in her hand." The voice comes across as conversational — gossipy and critical of the family without explicitly calling them out as the self-centered jerks readers come to know. The narrator tells us:

You might have expected to see [Salome] at the funeral, but [Manie's sister] Tannie Marina told her in no uncertain terms that she would not be allowed to attend. Why not? Ag, don't be stupid. So Salome has gone back to her own house instead, beg your pardon, to the Lombard place, and changed into her church clothes…and like that she sits out in front of her house, sorry, the Lombard place, on a second-hand armchair from which the stuffing is bursting out, and says a prayer for Rachel.

And later, as Salome works through the reception after the funeral:

In the kitchen, Marina supervises the black girl, who has a pile of plates and cups to wash. The way she drags herself around, so heavy and slow, you'd think she's the one who's lost a family member. Unforgivable to be lazy on a big day like this, she has to be pushed along like a boulder, it's exhausting giving orders all the time.

I found it remarkable that Galgut could define his characters so completely through scenes such as this. Writers are often advised to "show, not tell" and this book could be a masterclass in following that dictum. While the novel contains quite a few conversations, the author chooses to omit quotation marks. Every now and then this practice makes it unclear who is speaking or whether something was said aloud or only thought by a character, but this lack of clarity is the exception rather than the rule. In addition, the narrator seamlessly shifts focus from one character to another, sometimes mid-paragraph, which can also be confusing. I truly enjoyed the author's technique, though, and found that I quickly adapted to his unique style. The Promise is Galgut's ninth novel and his first to be awarded the Booker Prize, although two previous works were shortlisted for it (2003's The Good Doctor and In a Strange Room in 2010). My opinions don't always coincide with the committee's selections, but in this case I couldn't agree more; The Promise is excellent from start to finish, a consummate masterpiece. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a great work of literature.

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The Promise  by Damon Galgut

Chatto & Windus, $32.99 pb, 304 pp

R achel Swart is in the final decline of a terminal cancer when she extracts a promise from her husband, Manie: he agrees to give their maid Salome the deed to the Lombard Place, a small house on the family’s farm. It is an act of recognition. Salome has cared for her, has mopped up ‘blood and shit and pus and piss’, doing the jobs Rachel’s family found ‘too dirty or too intimate’. It is 1986 in South Africa, and already the idea of giving Salome the land on which she lives can’t help but invoke the paranoid spectre of widescale repatriation.

Like Maria in Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor (2003), the name Salome is burdened by the misplaced weight of Western culture. For hers is not a demand for upheaval – John the Baptist’s head – but a disquieting pull towards the promise of her own place; a promise that is cast aside at every opportunity by Manie and two of his children. The only one committed to upholding Rachel’s wish is her youngest daughter, Amor, who witnessed the deathbed bequest unnoticed: ‘They didn’t see me, I was like a black woman to them.’

Amor’s disempowerment, like Salome’s, allows her behind closed doors, but never comfortably. Her family is unnerved by her strangeness. As a child, she was struck by lightning while out on a koppie, an outcrop on the flat dry veld. It scorched her feet and felled a toe, an absence that ties her to the farm by cosmic joke. The farm itself is a bit of a joke too: ‘one horse and a few cows’. Yet it remains at the centre of The Promise , with Galgut offering this place of diminishing worth as a sardonic addendum to the tradition of the farm novel, so long a staple of white South African literature.

The tradition encompasses the idealised plaasroman of Afrikaans alongside antipastoral novels like Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883). Here on this solitary koppie, as an early review of Schreiner noted, ‘there come up for solution one after another the simple questions of human nature and human action’. In the first decades after the end of apartheid, the farm novel underwent perhaps its greatest upheaval as J.M Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) and Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat (2004) fundamentally unsettled the genre’s governing motif of domestication, challenging in the process the idea that human nature and action could be contained by the pastoral mode. And yet, in these two novels, the farm still acts as a site of generative connection between people broken by South Africa.

The Promise arrives at a time when the farm novel, having moved from pastoral epic to family tragedy, teeters on the brink of farce. But like the geological layers of the land itself, Galgut’s novel evidences in some vestigial form what has come before. If the farm in Schreiner’s novel was a ‘microcosm of colonial South Africa’, as Coetzee has labelled it, so is the Swart farm. It too represents a close-minded society that ‘drives out those of its number who seek the great white bird Truth’. The difference is that, with the progress of history, the isolated farm is no longer a world unto itself, no longer the model for the society around it.

As in Disgrace and Agaat , the Swart family’s delusions of self-sufficiency are pierced by illness and crime. Those pushed from the farm (Amor and, to a lesser extent, her siblings) are drawn back to bury their dead. Spaced at roughly ten-year intervals, a set of funerals provides both a neat structure for the book and a rough gauge with which to measure the promise of the New South Africa. Behind the burials, the country’s history sweeps from the 1986 state of emergency to Thabo Mbeki’s inauguration, drawing into view the AIDS crisis, the World Cup, rolling power cuts, and Jacob Zuma’s resignation in 2018.

This desire to contain everything is the source of the book’s wit. The typical farm novel’s symbolic reach allows much to be left unsaid. Not so with Galgut’s narrator, who fills the silences, shifting promiscuously in and out of the consciousnesses of the family and a host of ancillary characters with high modernist brio (often in the same sentence). He argues with them, teases them, watches them bathe and shit. He tells us what they think, even apologising when he ‘slips’ and refers to Salome’s house, ‘beg your pardon, the Lombard place’. Taking stock of the farmhouse during Rachel’s funeral, his omniscience rises to heights of glorious bathos:

The telephone has rung eighteen times, the doorbell twice … Twenty-two cups of tea, six mugs of coffee, three glasses of cool drink and six brandy-and-Cokes have been consumed. The three toilets downstairs, unused to such traffic, have between them flushed twenty-seven times, carrying away nine point eight litres of urine, five point two litres of shit, one stomachful of regurgitated food and five millilitres of sperm.

Amassing the facts of experience can’t really tell a life. Galgut knows this; the sum of the list signals that there are things that escape the novel’s comprehension.

Comprehension has two interlinked meanings in The Promise : understanding and inclusion. Both falter when it comes to Salome and her son Lukas. Galgut’s attempts to enter their thoughts are tentative, subjunctive. We finally arrive at a silence. In this self-satirising and disturbingly beautiful novel, we see why farms are peripheral in the work of Zakes Mda and not central to the politics of land as they are across the continent in the novels of Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

The tragedy of Galgut’s novel is that not everyone can fit in – not when the only way to keep promises is to build new layers on the state, the land and its literature without digging for new foundations.

• Damon Galgut

Marc Mierowsky

• Chatto & Windus
• Booker Prize Winner

Marc Mierowsky is a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow in English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne. His first book, on Daniel Defoe and the campaign to end Scottish independence, is forthcoming with Yale University Press. 

The Promise

by Damon Galgut

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Comments (2).

• That is a terrific and informative review, Marc, especially for folk like me, born in the UK with family in South Africa and having visited only once - around 1984. A sad, beautiful country I used to be in love with from afar, and still am, truth be told. I now run a book group in Melbourne, Australia. Thank you so much for your insights. Posted by Beryl Beaney 12 August 2022
• The book is a “good read” as you follow the events and conversations moving back and forth with the narrator. It is a present tragedy. However, I did wonder about the absence of English South Africans - do the two colonial streams never coincide? The priest hardly counts. Posted by Jennifer Raper 15 June 2022

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Review: South Africa’s answer to William Faulkner

Judges for the 2021 Booker Prize were unanimous in granting the award—the most prestigious literary honor for fiction in English—to Damon Galgut for The Promise . A bestselling South African novelist and playwright, Galgut wrote his first novel, A Sinless Season , at age 17. He was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2003 for The Good Doctor and in 2010 for In a Strange Room . Like the two earlier novels, The Promise focuses on racial tension in South Africa and the way greed promulgates that tension.

Europa Editions 269p $25

The judges called Galgut’s story a testament to the flourishing of the novel and noted its unique narrative design. Maya Jasanoff, chair of the Booker judges, said the narrative pays “remarkable attention to structure and literary style” and has “a lot to chew on.” I agree.

Here’s how the story works: Using present tense, omniscient point of view and a William Faulkner-like stream-of-consciousness, Galgut takes readers into the heads of every character. He even suggests the thoughts of jackals that eat a dove (perhaps a symbol) who flew into a window and died. Beginning each section of the story in medias res , he pushes the plot forward and adds suspense.

The Promise focuses on racial tension in South Africa and the way greed promulgates that tension.

The novel’s most unusual feature is the unnamed narrator, who speaks directly to the reader. Sounding like the stage manager in Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” he intervenes frequently. His presence enhances the story but also takes away from its verisimilitude, as when Rachel dies; he says, “In the hearse, I mean the house, a certain unspoken fear has ebbed….”

Set from the 1980s to the early 21st century, The Promise features an upper-middle-class white family living near Pretoria in South Africa. Galgut describes the family as “an amalgamation of everything I grew up with.” In that sense, it resembles the 2020 Booker Prize winner Shuggie Bain , Douglas Stuart’s first novel, which is also about a dysfunctional family facing discordant times—religious friction in Ireland in the 1980s.

Galgut’s plot probes the fortunes of the diverse Swart family, which is a mix of Jewish, Dutch Reformed and Roman Catholic. Their religious differences intensify the family dissonance and exacerbate racial problems during Apartheid and just after.

Amor Swart serves as the conscience of The Promise . The youngest of three siblings, she became clairvoyant when struck by lightning and would have died had Manie, her father, not carried her down the koppie (hill): “like Moses descending the mountain…it was the afternoon the Holy Spirit touched him and his life changed.”

Manie asks God’s forgiveness, swears off his sinful ways and begs his wife, Rachel, to pardon him for gambling and cheating with prostitutes. She refuses. Soon Rachel, who had converted to Manie’s Dutch Reformed Church, reconverts to Judaism.

Ultimately, Galgut slams Protestants, Jews, Roman Catholics and even meditation gurus.

The narrative begins as Rachel is dying. She asks Manie to give Salome, the family’s Black maid, the tumbledown shack where she lives with her son, Lukas. Manie promises to do so, and 13-year-old Amor overhears him. Galgut’s novel explores the ramifications of that promise, especially as it relates to racism, hypocrisy and lies—those the characters live with and those that destroy them.

Early on, we learn that Aunt Marina disdains Rachel because Aunt Marina disapproved of her brother’s marriage to a Jew and believed that Rachel “betrayed the whole family” when she reconverted. Marina is especially annoyed that Rachel asked Manie to give her property to a servant and he promised to do so. She is angry that Rabbi Katz insists on burying Rachel in a Jewish cemetery (as she had requested) rather than in the family burial ground, as a tearful Manie selfishly insists.

Manie reneges on his promise to Rachel and lies, saying that he did not promise any such thing. Amor tells him “a Christian never goes back on his word.” Throughout the 30 years of the story, Amor tries to influence her father and her two older siblings, Anton and Astrid, to fulfill their mother’s final wish, arguing, “A promise is a promise.”

Amor’s brother Anton is the most realized character. Sensitive and perspicacious, he considers himself the “prodigal son.” The narrator describes him as someone who “can see the right action and will not perform it…. Dunno. Just always been like that.” He disparages his father’s hypocrisy and distrusts clergymen, seeing them as liars.

Anton blasts Pastor Simmers, the nearly blind Dutch Reformed minister. The pastor, who sympathizes with Manie’s refusal to give Salome her shack, also plans to acquire a hefty section of the farm to build a fancy church through a revised will—in effect cheating the family. Later, Simmers persuades Manie to sit in a cobra cage to raise money for charity. Anton, seeing through the “Voortrekker shaman,” is infuriated.

Anton criticizes Father Batty, the Catholic priest, for his “sententious assurance” and insufferable sense of spiritual authority. Dressing up for the funeral Mass, the priest in his full regalia looks like “the human equivalent of a peacock.” He hears Astrid’s confession and reveals what she confessed. It bothers the priest only somewhat that he broke the seal of confession, a reaction that did not seem believable to this Roman Catholic. “The poor man was in pain,” Father Batty says, “and I told him the truth which cannot be a sin.”

The unfulfilled promise seems to bring on what Amor calls “the wrath of the Lord [which is] like an avenging flame.” Following the funerals of Rachel, Manie, Astrid and Anton, only Amor and Anton’s wife, Désirée, survive at the tale’s conclusion. Désirée doesn’t want to give Salome the property, saying she will just ruin it. Amor disagrees, declaring she takes promises seriously.

The storyline melds William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying with Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale”; Galgut skewers hypocrites, especially religious ones. No one in this narrative sells indulgences, but many sell themselves as exemplars of virtue even though they are evil.

Ultimately, Galgut slams Protestants, Jews, Roman Catholics and even meditation gurus. Putting it succinctly, Anton says, “There is a lie at the heart of everything,” which is as good a way as any to sum up a darkly comic story that seems less a novel than a many-layered morality tale.

This article also appeared in print, under the headline “South Africa’s Answer to William Faulkner,” in the Spring Literary Review 2022 , issue.

Diane Scharper, the author of several books, teaches in the Johns Hopkins University Osher program.

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A Family at Odds Reveals a Nation in the Throes

By James Wood

“She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on.” This is how Mrs. Dalloway thinks of herself, early in Virginia Woolf’s novel. It’s an even better description of how Woolf writes—how she passes between and beyond her characters, their anima and ghost, immanent and posthumous at once. “ Mrs. Dalloway ” appeared in 1925; two years later, in “ To the Lighthouse ,” Woolf would slice through her characters and even more flagrantly stand outside them and look on. In its famous middle section, “Time Passes,” Woolf describes how a decade elapses in an uninhabited country house, as the wallpaper peels away, the books rot, and the animals come to stay. The writing is both domestically meticulous (“The swallows nested in the drawing-room. . . . Tortoise-shell butterflies burst from the chrysalis and pattered their life out on the windowpane”) and gravely allegorical: the First World War sends out its tremors, characters die offstage, the sea boils with blood, the house almost falls but is finally saved. The house has come to represent a country and an era, and the novelist, who has become nothing less than time itself, rides the winds of history.

In scope, seriousness, and experimental ambition, modernist writing like Woolf’s sometimes appears to have expired along with its serious and experimental epoch, a moment when political and moral disenchantment was met by a belief in literature’s regenerative power. Yet Damon Galgut’s remarkable new novel, “ The Promise ” (Europa), suggests that the demands of history and the answering cry of the novel can still powerfully converge. As a white South African writer, Galgut inherits a subject that must feel, at different times, liberating in its dimensions and imprisoning in its inescapability. (J. M. Coetzee once argued that South African literature is a “literature in bondage,” because a “deformed and stunted” society produces a deformed and stunted inner life.) “The Promise” is drenched in South African history, a tide that can be seen, in the end, to poison all “promise.” The book moves from the dying days of apartheid, in the eighties, to the disappointment of Jacob Zuma’s Presidency of the past decade, and the tale is told as the fable of a family curse: first the mother dies, then the father, then one of their daughters, then their only son.

Galgut’s work has often demonstrated an appreciation of modernist techniques and emphases; his previous novel, “ Arctic Summer ” (2014), gently fictionalized E. M. Forster’s first trip to India, in 1912, out of which came Forster’s masterpiece, “ A Passage to India .” Like a number of early-twentieth-century novels (“Howards End” and “Brideshead Revisited” come to mind, along with “To the Lighthouse”), “The Promise” turns on the question of a house and its land (in this case, the Swart family farm), and who will live in it, inherit it, redeem it. But Galgut’s novel most closely resembles the work of predecessors like Woolf and Faulkner in the way it redeploys a number of modernist techniques, chiefly the use of a free-floating narrator. Galgut is at once very close to his troubled characters and somewhat ironically distant, as if the novel were written in two time signatures, fast and slower. And, miraculously, this narrative distance does not alienate our intimacy but emerges as a different form of knowing.

“The Promise” is broken into four sections of seventy pages or so, each one named for the character whose death summons the family to the farm, just outside Pretoria—four seasons of unchanging weather. The first section, entitled “Ma,” introduces us to the unhappy and divided Swart clan. Three children arrive to mourn Rachel, their mother: thirteen-year-old Amor, who has been sent away to a school she hates; her older sister, Astrid; and the eldest child, Anton, a nineteen-year-old doing his national service as a rifleman in the South African Army. The Swart children are Afrikaners, except that their mother was Jewish, and had converted to her husband’s Dutch Reformed Christianity. Not long before she died, Rachel converted back to Judaism, a fact that enrages her grieving, patriarchal husband, Manie Albertus Swart. Yet it was not Manie who nursed Rachel at the end but the family’s Black housekeeper, Salome: “She was with Ma when she died, right there next to the bed, though nobody seems to see her, she is apparently invisible. And whatever Salome feels is invisible too” is how the book’s spectral, omniscient narrator summarizes the politics of the situation.

Anton, the unhappiest of the three children, is at war with his family; Astrid accommodates; and young Amor, the family’s conscience, watches. In Amor’s role as witness and spy, she overheard a crucial pledge, which gives the novel its title: her dying mother made her husband promise that Salome would become the owner of the house she currently lives in, a three-room structure on the family estate. Now that Rachel is dead, the promise to Salome can be quickly forgotten. “I’m already paying for her son’s education,” Manie complains. “Must I do everything for her?” Amor badgers her relatives to honor her mother’s last wish, but the most receptive family member, Anton (who seems to like the idea mainly because it irritates their father), informs Amor that the gesture is probably illegal, anyway.

It is as if Ma’s death and the unkept promise had released a nimbus of dread. Only nine years later, in the novel’s second section (entitled “Pa”), the family reunites again, this time for their father’s funeral. A robust and religious man, Manie owned a reptile park called Scaly City. But one of his snakes has fatally bitten him. Amor, now grown up, lives in London, and, when she calls home, the ringing of the unanswered phone “almost physically conjures for her the empty rooms and passages down which it carries. That corner. That ornament. That sill.”

It is 1995; Nelson Mandela is the country’s President. When Amor arrives in Pretoria for the funeral, she’s struck by the city’s festive atmosphere. South Africa, long exiled from international sports, is playing France in the Rugby World Cup semifinals. Our narrator, wandering somewhere between Amor’s point of view and a kind of novelistic chorus, is briskly ironic: “Never did the middle of town look like this, so many black people drifting casually about, as if they belong here. It’s almost like an African city!” Family dynamics have shifted, somewhat. Astrid is now unhappily married, with two kids, and having an affair with “the man who came to put in our security.” Amor, once the disdained runt, is now considered glamorous. Other tensions are unchanged. Amor again raises the question of the promise made to Salome, and is again rebuffed. Anton, who deserted the Army years ago, is sponging off a girlfriend, and is mired in an aimless unemployability. Still militantly unhappy, he cannot mourn his estranged father. At the family farm, which the three children now inherit, “a thin pelt of dust has settled on every surface.”

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Summaries like this act as a kind of bad translation, in which what is most distinctive and precious about the novel disappears, to be replaced by time-lapse photography; the plot, on its own, can seem gothically extreme. (There are two deaths still to go: Astrid and Anton are yet to be sacrificed.) But the novel’s beautifully peculiar narration aerates and complicates this fatal family fable, and turns plot into deep meditation. It’s not the first time that Galgut has experimented with a shifting viewpoint. His novel “In a Strange Room,” which was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2010, moved between third person and first person; since the narrator of that novel was also called Damon, and the story took something of the form of a travelogue, the effect was suggestively autofictional. His new novel exercises new freedoms. One is struck, amid the sombre events, by the joyous, puckish restlessness of the storytelling, which seems to stick to a character’s point of view only to veer away, mid-sentence. Driving to the farm, for instance, Manie’s brother indulges in a bit of Afrikaner self-aggrandizement: “He’s not in the mood for political speeches, much nicer to look at the view. He imagines himself one of his Voortrekker ancestors, rolling slowly into the interior in an ox-wagon. Yes, there are those who dream in predictable ways. Ockie the brave pioneer, floating over the plain.” The narration even flows away from itself, into little ironic eddies: “The house is dark, except for floodlights fore and aft, note the nautical terms, illuminating the driveway and the lawn.” Or: “In the hearse, I mean the house, a certain unspoken fear has ebbed.”

Galgut uses his narrator playfully, assisted by nicely wayward run-on sentences. Technically, it’s a combination of free indirect style (third-person narration pegged to a specific character) and what might be called unidentified free indirect style (third-person narration pegged to a shadowy narrator, or a vague village chorus). As the Portuguese novelist José Saramago does, Galgut outsources his storytelling, handing off a phrase or an insight to an indistinct community of what seem to be wise elders, who then produce an ironically platitudinous or proverbial commentary. After describing how Ma’s ghost is visiting the farm, Galgut adds, “How would you know she is a ghost? Many of the living are vague and adrift too, it’s not a failing unique to the departed.” And here he writes about Salome and Anton: “She has seen him grow up, from a tottering infant to a golden boy to this, whatever he is now, tending to him every step of the way. When he was little he used to call her Mama and tried to suck on her nipple, a common South African confusion.” Though Galgut’s narrator has the authority of omniscience, it’s used lightly, glancingly, so that this perilous all-knowingness often makes his characters not more transparent but more mysterious: “Dr. Raaff wields his tweezers with more-than-usual dexterity. . . . His fastidiousness is pleasing to his patients, but if they only knew the daydreams of Dr. Wally Raaff, few would submit to being examined by him.” (Those daydreams stay in the private domain of Dr. Raaff.) Galgut is wonderfully, Woolfianly adept at moving quickly between characters’ thoughts. At a funeral, at a party, in the middle of the night as the family members sleep in the farmhouse, Galgut’s narrator skims across his spaces, alighting, stinging, moving on to the next subject. As the novel proceeds, his narrator seems to grow in adventurous authority. At one moment, he drops into the minds of a couple of jackals, scavenging on the veldt: “It is necessary to renew their markings, using bodily juices, to lay down the border. Beyond here is us. Written in piss and shit, inscribed from the core.”

And, again like Woolf, Galgut finds the prospect of slipping into an uninhabited house all-tempting:

The house is empty at this moment. It’s been deserted for a couple of hours, apparently inert but making tiny movements, sunlight stalking through these rooms, wind rattling the doors, expanding here, contracting there, giving off little pops and creaks and burps, like any old body. It seems alive, an illusion common to many buildings, or perhaps to how people see them. . . . But nobody is here to witness it, nothing stirs, except for the dog in the driveway, leisurely licking his testicles.

The narration enlivens the book, and one is grateful for the steady beat of humor. The double consciousness of the authorial irony “corrects” the characters, puts them in their place; in so doing, it also makes their lives blessedly provisional and brief, as if the author were reminding us that this particular story, with all its specific horrors, also belongs to a universal history that will soon forget them. Not for nothing does the narrator remind us, and his characters, on the last page of the book, that “other stories will write themselves over yours, scratching out every word. Even these.”

The reader will surely need this teasing authorial doubleness, as a brace against an implacable darkening. The novel’s third section (“Astrid”) brings home the dwindling Swart survivors for another family funeral: Astrid has been killed in a carjacking. Again, history moves forward jerkily, in furlongs of family time, like those juddering minute hands on old railway-station clocks. It is 2004, and Thabo Mbeki is about to start his second term as South Africa’s President. Anton, who is drinking heavily, lives on the farm, where he is working intermittently on an unfinishable novel, one concerning, he says, “the torments of the human condition. Nothing unusual.” Amor now lives in Durban, where she is a nurse in an H.I.V. ward. She’s thirty-one, starting to gray, but still morally aflame: when she presses her brother on “the promise,” he fobs her off. In 2018, when Anton dies, in the fourth section of the novel, only Salome is left to phone Amor. The youngest inherits the farm, along with Anton’s widow, Desirée. There is one thing left for Amor to do—renounce her inheritance and insure that Salome, who is now an old woman, finally becomes the legal owner of the house she has occupied for decades.

Coetzee’s “ Disgrace ,” another novel about a farm, history’s poison, and the question of inheritance, inevitably shadows “The Promise.” In both books, a certain kind of allegorical pressure, partly insisted on by the author and partly by history itself, makes the story gigantically, uncomfortably representative. (It is perhaps what Coetzee meant by a literature held in bondage.) The Swart farm cannot be just a family property but must also come to stand in for debatable land, and perhaps also for an entire contested country. The force of the fable is explicit, becoming more so as the novel gathers its significances. An Afrikaner family has occupied the farmhouse for many years but is cursed to perish, to leave it, and to wander—at Astrid’s funeral, the pastor likens such people to the seed of Cain, exiled from a paradisal land. In the novel’s accounting, white South Africans cannot inherit this land, and do not deserve to: Anton’s low sperm count means that he and Desirée could not have children, and Amor, too, is childless. The optimistic harvest of “Howards End”—children, the very future, at play before the grand old house—has spoiled. As in “Disgrace,” the only posture appropriate for white people seems to be atonement and divestment: Amor selflessly at work in the hospital wards, single in Durban, without family or farm.

If anything, “The Promise” feels more pessimistic than “Disgrace.” In its closing pages, the South African experiment seemingly teeters. Government is corrupt; there are power outages and water shortages, harbingers of worse to come. And when Amor finally makes good on the promise—the moment the novel has been patiently preparing for—Salome’s son, Lukas, who played with Amor when they were kids, is not grateful but angry. Who can blame him? “My mother was supposed to get this house a long time back,” he says. “Thirty years ago! Instead she got lies and promises. And you did nothing.” Even when Amor offers to empty her bank account for Salome and Lukas, the promise has come too late, or come to naught. Like his country, Anton had much promise; his unfinished novel was about a young man who grew up on a farm, and was “full of promise and ambition.” But then, when Amor asks Lukas what has happened to the sweet boy she once knew, he says, “Life. Life happened.” Can Amor’s loving, self-sacrificial kenosis offer a feasible political model? Or is she a holy outlier, an eccentric lost in her saintly inefficacy? Amid this general banking down of possibility, it’s striking that, in a novel marked by the adventurous journeying of its narrator, the perspective of Salome, the very pivot of the book, is barely inhabited. Her ambitions, her thinking, her future, remain largely, and pointedly, unheard. Galgut makes a bitterly deliberate case for such silence—underlining the idea that Salome has indeed been silenced by those in control of her destiny—and insures that it is both eloquent and saddening. ♦

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The promise by Damon Galgut: a book review

The promise Damon Galgut Cape Town: Umuzi, 2021 ISBN: 9781415210581 243 pages

Arguably what distinguishes the brilliant writer from the indifferently good one is whether or not he or she is able to manipulate the chosen form, leaving it more resourceful, and pliable, for those who come after. On these terms, Damon Galgut is decidedly a brilliant writer. The promise is a major achievement, fully deserving its place on the Man Booker Prize longlist.

In an interview with Mark Gevisser in the Johannesburg Review of Books , Galgut says, “Most of the stories have been told by now, it’s just the ways of telling that are new.” It’s an exaggeration, of course, but the comment expresses a truth about The promise in relation to its forebears in South African fiction. For in telling the story of the ironically named Swart family, Galgut is revisiting terrain that has been mapped many times before – from Karel Schoeman ( Na die geliefde land ) to Nadine Gordimer ( July’s people ) to Marlene van Niekerk ( Agaat ) – namely, the decline of the white South African family, buffeted by history and undermined from within.

None of these eminent forerunners, however, has quite the black-comedic quality that Galgut brings to his story (another implication of Swart, possibly), implying that the subject has lost some of the gravitas it once had, at least for Galgut.

The promise is primarily a family history in four funerals, loosely latticed to a history of South Africa over four decades – from the state of emergency in the mid-1980s, to the triumphalism of the mid-’90s (when we won the rugby world cup), to the fissuring of the nonracial dream under Mbeki, to the abjection of the Zuma years, when the “promise” has soured, not least for most black citizens.

...........

In each period, the Swarts lose a family member, starting with the mother, Rachel, who dies of cancer, but not before she has decided to abandon the family’s flaky Pentecostalism and return to her Jewish roots (which means a Jewish funeral, a struggle for Pa and the rest of the family). Pa himself dies of snakebite while performing a stunt at his snake park, unprotected by the new religion, followed by the elder sister, Astrid, who is murdered in a hijacking. The final death is Anton’s, who shoots a woman protestor while on active service as a conscript, then turns conscientious objector, and later takes his own life with the family shotgun, having failed at all of his projects, including that of becoming a novelist.

The survivor, and central character, is the poignantly named – and estranged – Amor, who is marked by her upbringing and family history – graphically so, having been struck by lightning as a child, which burned the soles of her feet and severed a little toe. Amor forges on to the end, overcoming the compromised lives and deaths of her parents and siblings, living a diminished life in a lonely Durban flat, far away from the family roots in Pretoria, but as a nurse, healing others.

If there is any redemption, it is in Amor, who keeps alive the promise made by Rachel before she dies, that a house in a neglected corner of the Swarts’ farm (Galgut puts the tropes of the farm novel way back in the past) should be given to Salome, the maid who serves the family for 30 years. It is called the Lombard house, after old Mrs Lombard, who used to live there in the time of a grandfather, and Salome is allowed to live in it only to prevent an Indian family from taking it over.

The Swarts prevaricate on the promise made to Salome, unable to take seriously Amor’s insistence that she heard it being uttered, and unable to keep the promise even when they do believe it was made. It comes down to Amor to do the right thing after Anton’s death, before she abandons the family home forever.

The four-part structure of four funerals across the four decades sounds schematic, but it is entirely plausible in Galgut’s hands. Similarly, Amor’s gift to Salome might sound allegorical (an allegory, that is, of the challenge facing whites to share some of their wealth for the common good), but it is, in reality, the gift of an old, broken-down afslanertjie of a house, which feels right for what has become of the new South Africa.

Galgut’s subject is familiar, albeit with some new twists, but he is right to put the emphasis on the telling of the story, rather than on the story itself, for the real triumph of The promise lies in the narration.

.............

Galgut’s subject is familiar, albeit with some new twists, but he is right to put the emphasis on the telling of the story, rather than on the story itself, for the real triumph of The promise lies in the narration. Essentially, what Galgut does is rewrite the rules of third-person narration, not by abandoning the position of omniscience, but indeed by elevating it. He creates a hyper-omniscience that knows no bounds, entering the life not only of the characters, but also of the whole messed-up world of the novel, including its ghosts. Crucially, he does so in the idiom of the characters. The intimacy this creates of the narration with its subject, or subjects, is startling, so much so that until we settle into it, we would be forgiven for thinking that the identity of the narrator will emerge sooner or later as one of the family, a secret sharer of its senescence.

At times, Galgut’s writing simply soars, as in these sentences where the rabbi at Rachel’s funeral speaks with a religiosity that doesn’t touch the Swarts, certainly not the 11-year-old Amor, creating a world where there is no consolation for anyone except, possibly, the writer:

See the words fly, through the window, through the door of the room, down the passage, out of the window. Watch them rise over the city and wing their way in a little psalm-shaped flock to the farm, in search of the woman to whom they are chanted. They circle the koppie and dive down to the lawn, they enter the house through the back door and pass on stilted legs through the kitchen, like a change in the light. (49)

In several interviews, Galgut speaks of the influences that have pushed him in this direction. Having begun with a more conventional third-person narrative, he suspended the project to work on a film script, rewriting drafts that alerted him to the fluidity of the camera. When he returned to the novel, he rewrote it, importing the filmic perspectives. One is reminded of JM Coetzee speaking of the influence of the art cinema of the 1960s, using experimental techniques like stills with voice-over commentary, the result being the startling intensity and economy of In the heart of the country , which is written as a series of numbered paragraphs. While Coetzee left out the pedestrian scene-setting of the realist novel, the influence of film on The promise lies in the virtuosity with which Galgut handles point of view.

The other influence, perhaps unsurprisingly, is Galgut’s discovery (late, by his admission) of Virginia Woolf, whose modernist narration famously emerges from within the consciousness of multiple characters. It was Woolf who said that life can’t be illuminated like a series of carriage lamps in a row; it is, rather, “a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end”. The restless, shifting point of view of her fiction tries to capture this evanescence.

Galgut would no doubt agree, but so much of what he brings to the undertaking is his own, especially a penchant for withering humour, and a visceral, psychosexual energy and acuity that insists that this drama is human first, and national-historical second. Consider the middle-aged Amor, for example, in the closing paragraphs, climbing onto the roof of the farmhouse to scatter Anton’s ashes, where they make a brown streak across the tiles. As a child, she had missed the key part of Rachel’s funeral because her periods chose that moment to start and she had to flee the chapel and head for the supermarket. Now, she is having hot flushes, so she removes her shirt, a madwoman in her bra on the roof, holding an empty urn.

You’re drying slowly in your channels, running out of sap. You’re a branch that’s losing its leaves and one day you’ll break off. Then what? Then nothing. Other branches will fill the space. Other stories will write themselves over yours, scratching out every word. Even these.

Even these final, self-cancelling sentences of The promise , that is. It is a book whose wit, honesty and brilliance will ensure that it has a prominent place in South African fiction, regardless of what happens on 3 November when the Man Booker Prize winner is announced.

Full particulars: A podcast on historical fiction – David Attwell in conversation with Zoë Wicomb and Andrew van der Vlies

Full particulars: Where in the world is the South?

An island by Karen Jennings: an interview

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The Promise

44 pages • 1 hour read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Before You Read

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Pages 1-44

Part 1, Pages 45-89

Part 2, Pages 93-130

Part 2, Pages 130-151

Part 3, Pages 155-176

Part 3, Pages 177-192

Part 3, Pages 192-215

Part 4, Pages 219-232

Part 4, Pages 232-257

Part 4, Pages 257-269

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Summary and Study Guide

The Promise , published in 2021, is South African writer Damon Galgut’s eighth novel. Galgut’s fiction frequently explores the complicated world of South African society and politics, particularly the legacy of apartheid. The Promise tells the story of the Swarts, a white family descended from Dutch settlers who came to South Africa in the 17th century. The three Swart children come of age as the country undergoes the abolition of apartheid, a system that formally segregated South Africans on the basis of race. Each of the novel’s four parts revolves around one family member’s death, tracing the Swarts’ decline. Stylistically, The Promise aligns with classic works of literary modernism from the early 20th century in the tradition of William Faulkner or Virginia Woolf, thanks to its wandering, fluid point of view .

Plot Summary

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Part 1, “Ma,” revolves around the 1986 death of the Swart matriarch, Rachel. The youngest Swart sibling, Amor , resides at a boarding school, and the eldest Swart sibling, Anton , is current completing his mandatory service with the military. They both return home to join their middle sister, Astrid , and attend Rachel’s funeral services. Before she died, Rachel asked her husband, Manie , to grant the family’s Black maid, Salome , ownership of the house she lives in on the family’s land to repay her for her devoted service. Manie agrees, but after Rachel’s death he denies ever making the promise, despite Amor’s persistent objections that she heard it. Anton’s disagreement with Manie about the promise and other topics surrounding Rachel’s death creates a rift. After the funeral services, Amor goes back to her boarding school and Anton returns to his military unit. At the last minute, however, he decides to desert the military and hitchhikes to a far-off region.

Part 2, “Pa,” finds all three Swart children in their adulthood: Amor lives in London, Astrid is married with twins, and Anton lives far from the Swart family farm without a steady job. Nine years have passed since the last time all three siblings were together at their family home, but Manie’s death brings them back to Pretoria. By this time, Nelson Mandela is president and apartheid has ended, meaning that Black South Africans are now allowed, among other things, to enjoy the same spaces as white South Africans. The details of Manie’s death are macabre: At a publicized fundraiser for his minister Alwyn Simmers’s church, Manie climbs into a snake tank at his reptile park in order to test his faith and try to break the world record for the longest time spent in a snake tank. Predictably, the snake bites him and he dies shortly after. Because of a clause in Manie’s will, Anton is forced to apologize to Simmers over a previous disagreement in order to claim his part of the substantial inheritance Manie leaves behind for his three children. While Anton agrees to Amor’s request that he finally honor Manie’s promise to give Salome ownership of her home, he takes no action to do so.

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Another nine years pass between Part 2 and Part 3. Amor left London and now works as a nurse in a South African AIDS ward. Astrid left her first husband for a man with whom she had an affair. Anton married a girlfriend from his youth, Desirée, and lives on the Swart farm. Although Astrid’s new marriage puts her in close proximity to powerful political figures, this status does not help her avoid South Africa’s rising crime rates: A carjacker kills her to steal and sell her car. Once more, Amor and Anton reunite at the Swart farm for a funeral. Amor again raises the unfulfilled promise to Anton; however, Anton takes no action.

Part 4 begins in 2017. One night, Anton—drunk, mired in depression, and unable to find any purpose in life—kills himself with his father’s gun in a field outside the Swart home. Amor returns home one last time determined to finally do something about Manie’s promise. She enlists the help of the family lawyer and finally, after 31 years, presents Salome with the ownership of the house she lives in. Salome’s son, Lukas, treats this gesture with scorn, insisting it has no meaning given how belated it is. Amor also gives Salome the entire sum of her inheritance from Manie, however, which is a more financially substantial gift. After scattering her brother’s ashes, Amor prepares to leave the farm and start the next chapter of her life with the weight of the unfulfilled promise finally off her shoulders. 

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The Promise: A Novel (Booker Prize Winner) Hardcover – April 6, 2021

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WINNER OF THE 2021 BOOKER PRIZE

A  NEW YORK TIMES  EDITORS’ CHOICE

A modern family saga written in gorgeous prose by three-time Booker Prize-shortlisted author Damon Galgut.

Haunted by an unmet promise, the Swart family loses touch after the death of their matriarch. Adrift, the lives of the three siblings move separately through the uncharted waters of South Africa; Anton, the golden boy who bitterly resents his life’s unfulfilled potential; Astrid, whose beauty is her power; and the youngest, Amor, whose life is shaped by a nebulous feeling of guilt.

Reunited by four funerals over three decades, the dwindling family reflects the atmosphere of its country—one of resentment, renewal, and, ultimately, hope.  The Promise  is an epic drama that unfurls against the unrelenting march of national history, sure to please current fans and attract many new ones.

“Simply: you must read it.” —Claire Messud,  Harper’s Magazine

• Print length 256 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Europa Editions
• Publication date April 6, 2021
• Dimensions 5.9 x 1.2 x 8.5 inches
• ISBN-10 1609456580
• ISBN-13 978-1609456580
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

★ “Galgut extends his extraordinary corpus with a rich story of family, history, and grief.”— Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

★ “This tour-de-force unleashes a searing portrait of a damaged family and a troubled country in need of healing.”— Publishers Weekly  (Starred Review)

★ “Galgut’s compelling new novel blends characters and history and intricate themes to reveal the devastating impacts of white privilege and institutional racism… The Promise is timely, relevant, and thematically significant.”— Booklist (Starred Review)

“The novel carries within it the literary spirits of Woolf and Joyce... To praise the novel in its particulars—for its seriousness; for its balance of formal freedom and elegance; for its humor, its precision, its human truth—seems inadequate and partial. Simply: you must read it.”— Claire Messud, Harper’s Magazine

“Galgut’s novel most closely resembles the work of predecessors like Woolf and Faulkner. The novel’s beautifully peculiar narration aerates and complicates this fatal family fable, and turns plot into deep meditation... Galgut is wonderfully, Woolfianly adept.”— James Wood, The New Yorker

“The plot is just the vehicle for a story that reveals the dark heart of South Africa’s recent and turbulent history; apartheid, conscription, peace and reconciliation are all glossed. In The Promise  is a kind of fluid narrativity which means we, the reader, are literally swept along, while Galgut pays a very direct tribute to Joyce in the final cadenced pages. He’s done it with mastery, guile, and a generous amount of empathy. The Promise is a masterpiece.”— Independent.ie

“Time and again in Mr. Galgut’s fiction, South Africa materializes, vast, astonishing, resonant. And on this vastness, he stages intimate dramas that have the force of ancient myth.”— Anna Mundow, Wall Street Journal

“ The Promise  offers all the virtues of realist fiction, plus some extras. A reader can shrug it all off and focus on the family’s story, or take pleasure in a brash writer’s narrative norm-breaking… In comparison [to Coetzee], Galgut is a gleeful satirist, mordantly skewering his characters’ fecklessness and hypocrisy.”— Rand Richards Cooper, The New York Times Book Review

“This bravura novel about the undoing of a bigoted South African family during apartheid deserves awards.”— The Guardian

“Riveting... Galgut’s most ambitious novel to date... The Promise is different from his other books. It’s more specific in its depictions of this starkly divided society, more direct in the way it approaches what has always been the country’s most significant political issue, its central injustice: the land and whom it belongs to... The Promise ’s power lies in its measured, exacting, occasionally cruel depiction of the way the land question has irretrievably warped almost every character in the novel, whether or not they are capable of acknowledging it.”— New York Review of Books

“I would hope this turns up the volume from our side and that it’s heard more clearly on the other.”— Los Angeles Times

“This powerful, emotionally charged novel ... charts the wayward progress and mixed fortunes of Rachel's racist husband, Manie, and their three children through subsequent decades, while simultaneously depicting a nation undergoing tumultuous change.”— Minneapolis Star Tribune

“A family saga that moves from the 1980s to the present, it’s a complex, ambitious and brilliant work—one that provides Galgut’s fullest exploration yet of the poisonous legacy of apartheid.”— Financial Times (UK)

“A South African family saga bursting with life is one of the best books of the year.”— The Times (UK)

“A magisterial, heart-stopping novel.”— The Times Literary Supplement

“ The Promise by Damon Galgut is an exceptional book, beautifully written with characters you come to care deeply about.”— BBC

“The unusual narrative style balances a kind of Faulknerian exuberance with a Nabokovian precision and is a testament to the flourishing of the novel in the 21st century. The novel can best be summed up in the question: Does true justice exist in the world—and if so, what might that look like? This novel’s way of tackling this question makes it an accomplishment and truly deserving of its place on the shortlist.”— Chigozie Obioma , 2021 Booker Prize judge and author of The Fisherman and An Orchestra of Minorities

“ The Promise is the most important book of the last ten years.”— Edmund White, author of  A Boy’s Own Story and A Saint from Texas

“ The Promise  is close to a folk tale or the retelling of a myth about fate and loss... The story has an astonishing sense of depth, as though the characters were imagined over time, with slow tender care.”— Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn

“ The Promise ’s power and immediacy merge to create an outstanding novel of its time.”— Joan Bakewell, author of All the Nice Girls and The Centre of the Bed

“ The Promise recalls the great achievements of modernism in its imagistic brilliance, its caustic disenchantment, its relentless research into the human. For formal innovation and moral seriousness, Damon Galgut is very nearly without peer. He is an essential writer.”— Garth Greenwell, author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You

“Both tender and brutal, The Promise  brilliantly illuminates how both a small family and a large world endure—or don't endure. I will remember this beautifully devastating book, its enigmatic heroine, for a long time.”— Peter Cameron, author of What Happens at Night

“Galgut understands the complexities of the human heart which he reveals with the finest delicacy. This is an emotionally powerful and thrilling novel that haunts one long after it has been laid down.” — Gabriel Byrne, author of Walking With Ghosts and Pictures in My Head

“If possible, The Promise  packs yet more of a punch than Galgut’s previous novels. Fuelled by sex and death, this is a South African Götterdämmerung charting a white family’s inexorable decline from significance and power. Its indignation at its morally bankrupt central characters is leavened with languid comedy, as though Galgut had collaborated with Tennessee Williams. The effect is utterly compelling.”— Patrick Gale, author of Notes from an Exhibition and A Place Called Winter

 “If there is a posterity, Galgut will be seen as one of the great literary triumphs of South Africa’s transition... in every way the equal of J. M. Coetzee.”— Rian Malan, author of My Traitor’s Heart

About the Author

Damon Galgut was born in Pretoria. His 2003 novel The Good Doctor won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region) and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In a Strange Room (Europa, 2010) was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. In 2021, Galgut won the Booker Prize for The Promise (Europa, 2021). In 2013, Galgut was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in Cape Town, South Africa.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Europa Editions (April 6, 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1609456580
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1609456580
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.1 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.9 x 1.2 x 8.5 inches
• #3,801 in Family Saga Fiction
• #4,687 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
• #14,385 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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Book review: The Promise by Damon Galgut

The promise of the title was made to Rachel by their father. Rachel wanted their black servant, Salome, to have the house she lived in on the farm. Amor witnessed his agreement and presses him on it but to no avail.

You might therefore expect the promise, its consequences, and its effect on Salome and her son to be central to the novel. Instead it is background, as is apartheid and its aftermath, the changing political culture, crime and corruption, truth and reconciliation, and outbreaks of violence. They are all part of the lives of the characters, and they shape them in profound ways, but for the characters money, sex and the search for meaning are to the fore.

In a sense this is a powerful comment. Something that would be transformative for Salome is of only marginal interest to the family, an irritant in the corner of their eyes. Despite the fact that Salome grew up with Rachel, and her son was a childhood friend of Rachel’s children, that she is a constant presence in their home, cooking and cleaning and nurturing, we have only occasional glimpses of her and learn little about her thoughts.

However, there is also an implicit promise to the reader that this conflict will drive the story. I kept waiting for the novel to get going, dismissing the family soap opera as a prelude to the real narrative. When I was halfway through and realised that their patchwork of inner musings was the novel, I wondered why I should keep reading. The Swarts just aren’t that interesting (despite some of them dying in dramatic fashion).

The writing is good, there is lovely observation and moments of wry humour, but that will only get you so far. And ‘you’ are rather central to the narrative, which roves around various points of view. As well as the family all having their say, sometimes in alternating sentences in the same scene, minor characters appear for a few pages then fade away. Dialogue is not punctuated so it’s not always clear what is spoken and what is only thought.

A god-like narrator occasionally intervenes and breaks the frame, but not with any consistency, so the ‘you’ in any given sentence might be the reader, or a character accusing another in their thoughts, or addressing their own divided self.

I did read to the end, where there is a resolution of sorts, but it is contingent, the authorial voice points out it couldn’t have happened exactly as it’s told, the outcome is not what any of the various yous might have hoped for, it will not heal all that has gone before. In this, the family drama and the national one are neatly tied.

Overall, Booker Prize winner The Promise was interesting in many ways but felt too long, while Booker shortlisted The Good Doctor was a terse, brilliant read that told a complex story of post-apartheid South Africa through a confined cast of characters. Is it another case of right author, wrong book?

I received a copy of The Promise from the publisher via Netgalley. View The Promise on Goodreads

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Published by Kate Vane

I write crime and literary fiction and share reviews and bookish thoughts on my blog. View all posts by Kate Vane

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Finding the books that get people talking

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The Promise by Damon Galgut: a quietly powerful family epic • Episode #111

Join us for our latest book club episode on The Promise by Damon Galgut.

Dazzling, original, heartfelt and exhilarating, or bleak, depressing, incoherent and unrealistic? What did Kate’s book club make of The Promise , Damon Galgut’s Booker-prize-winning novel, which tells the story of one white South-African family, and the promise made to their black servant, Salome.

On a farm outside Pretoria, the Swarts are gathering for Ma’s funeral. The younger generation, Anton and Amor, detest everything the family stand for – not least their treatment of the Black woman who has worked for them her whole life. Salome was to be given her own house, her own land…yet somehow, that vow is carefully ignored. As each decade passes, and the family assemble again, one question hovers over them. Can you ever escape the repercussions of a broken promise?

The Booker judges called The Promise ‘A tour de force …. A spectacular demonstration of how the novel can make us see and think afresh’, while novelist Claire Messud wrote ‘The Promise evokes, when you reach the final page, a profound interior shift that is all but physical. This, as an experience of art, happens only rarely, and is to be prized.’

And so it was with high expectations that Kate’s book club set about their annual reading of the Booker prizewinner, but did The Promise meet them? Listen in as we’re joined by regular book-clubber Stuart Marshall and don’t miss our follow-on book recommendations at the end, from Trevor Noah’s Born A Crime to Claire Keegan’s impactful novella Small Things Like These .

Book recommendations

Today Trevor Noah is a household name, presenting The Daily Show in the US and commanding audiences and attention around the world. But not so long ago he was a little-known comedian, struggling to break into the big time. Because he was ‘mixed race’, with a Xhosa mother and a white, Swiss, father, Noah’s existence was illegal in Apartheid South Africa and his childhood a strange one as a result. He wasn’t allowed to go out onto the street and play, for example, and spent all his time in family members’ houses. His mother had to walk behind him when they went out in public so that people would not realise that he was her son. Despite his difficult upbringing Noah thrived and in addition to his comedic talent he is a wonderful writer. This vivid account will have you glued to the page and it provides a fascinating background to South African society. USA Today called it ‘A soul-nourishing pleasure, even with all its darker edges and perilous turns’ and we highly recommend it to, for book club or for your own personal reading pleasure.

“How does a government steal a child and then imprison him? How does it keep that a secret? This book is how.” My Name is Why is Lemn Sissay’s memoir of his childhood, brought up by a foster family after his mother gave birth to him in the UK and then returned to Ethiopia. Although the family who took him in were initially loving, things changed as they had children of their own and he grew older. The book is a mixture of his own memories interspersed with documents from the Social Services that chronicled what was going on behind the scenes. Abandoned again by his foster family Sissay ended up in children’s homes, and eventually in a juvenile reform centre. It’s a little bit of a random inclusion here, but it came up after the discussion of Trevor Noah. Like Noah, Sissay had the creative gifts that enabled him to survive and this is a wonderful book that would make for brilliant book club discussion. If you haven’t read it, do give it a try.

Claire Keegan’s haunting short novel tells of Bill Furlong, a man who has risen from humble origins to become a successful coal merchant, supplying the small Irish town with fuel. At home are his wife and five daughters, and together they live modestly but comfortably. Bill’s life is an unvarying routine of work and him but one day, delivering coal to the local convent, he discovers a young woman freezing, locked in the coal cellar. Considering his own upbringing, and his love for his daughters, Bill comes to question his certainties about the ‘good’ sisters of the Convent and the folk of the town who like him, turn a blind eye. Beautifully written, thought-provoking and moving, this would be a wonderful starting point for book club discussion.

‘Mehring is rich. He has all the privileges and possessions that South Africa has to offer, but his possessions refuse to remain objects. His wife, son and mistress leave him; his foreman and workers become increasingly indifferent to his stewardship; even the land rises up, as drought, then flood, destroy his farm. As the upheaval in Mehring’s world increasingly resembles that in the country as a whole, it becomes clear that only a seismic shift in ideas and concrete action can avert annihilation.’ Not one that we’ve yet read, but definitely one we want to get to soon, and the perfect follow-on from The Promise .

If you enjoyed this show don’t miss our 2021 Booker Prize special episode , where we discuss The Promise and the other five shortlisted titles, and listen in live as the winner is announced.

If Laura’s Trevor Noah recommendation has left you wanting more you can watch You Laugh But It’s True , a documentary following his first stand-up show in the US.

This interview with Damon Galgut for Waterstones offers much insight into his intentions for The Promise .

Episode Transcript

Kate: Hello, and welcome to the Book Club Review. I’m Kate.

Laura: I’m Laura.

K: And this is the podcast about book clubs and the books that get you talking. Today we’re discussing The Promise by South African novelist Damon Galgut, which follows the Swart family as each member comes to terms with a promise made by the father to his dying wife that their servant and housekeeper, Salome, would be given ownership of her small house on the family’s land.

L: The Promise won the Booker Prize in 2021. Fellow novelist Rose Tremain called Galgut ‘the most worthy winner of the Booker Prize we’ve seen for many years.’ She added, ‘The book trembles in the hand with its political relevance.’ Meanwhile, Elizabeth Day called it ‘A masterpiece. One of the best books I’ve read in the past decade, a moving brilliantly told family epic.’

K: The book is no stranger to us here on the pod as we enjoyed reading and discussing it for our Booker Prize episode . But that was before my book club got their teeth into it. What did they think that it sparked debate? And whether they loved or loved it? The big question is, was it the great book club book, keep listening, as we’re joined by Stuart Marshall, regular member of my book club to find out.

K: Hi, Stuart, welcome to the pod.

Stuart: It’s a pleasure to be here. Nice to join you in the virtual podcast shed.

K: It feels very familiar to me to have you here because I’m quite used to seeing you on screen. I particularly wanted you to join us because you, unlike anyone else in my book club, actually have a family connection to South Africa, don’t you?

S: I certainly do. Yeah, my mother’s side of the family. They actually come from Holland but spent the majority of their lives out in South Africa. My mum lived there till she was in her late 20s And I was actually born out there. I’m not gonna say that I’m an expert on South African politics or anything, but I definitely have a few personal experiences and some stuff that my mum’s shared with me.

K: Okay, The Promise, what’s it about? It charts the crash and burn of a white South African family living on a farm outside Pretoria, the Swarts are gathering for Ma’s funeral. The younger generation, Anton and Amor, detest everything the family stands for, not least the failed promise to the black woman who has worked for them her whole life. After years of service, Salome was promised her own house her own land. Yet somehow as each decade passes, that promise remains unfulfilled.

The narrator’s eyes shift and blink, moving fluidly between characters, flying into their dreams, deliciously lethal in its observation. And as the country moves from old, deep divisions to its new so-called fairer society, the lost promise of more than just one family hovers behind the novel’s title.

The audio book is read by Peter Noble. Let’s listen to a clip.

[Audio clip]

K: I was not that familiar with South African history. Beyond the really obvious big picture stuff. Obviously, I was aware of Apartheid, was aware of the end of Apartheid. I knew who Nelson Mandela was, I knew that the rugby team had done well, just bits and pieces. When I read The Promise , I was very aware that it was referencing different periods in South African history. And for me, I was learning about it through the book.

I was looking online and someone summed it up quite nicely: ‘The novel traverses four decades of modern South Africa, starting with the last years of Apartheid, and proceeding through the optimism of Mandela and the Rugby World Cup, the corruption of Zuma and ending with the faint hope and promise of a new South Africa.’

And so in this book, we’ve literally got this promise between one person and another, but also this metaphorical promise. So there’s a lot going on here, plus a very character driven story. And it’s told in quite an interesting way, this narrative style is very distinct, and something that certainly the Booker judges picked up on. Stuart, how did you get on with that narrative voice?

S: For me, that was probably the outstanding element of this book. I’m a big fan of film, it had a real cinematic edge to it. It was no surprise to me, that whole narrative structure was born out of the author’s experience coming from writing a film script, he said that the writer could behave like a camera moving in close and then suddenly pulling far back jumping from one character to another in the middle of a scene, or even a sentence or following some sideline of action that has nothing to do with the plot. I think that really captured perfectly what he achieved.

And I think the real skill in it was how successfully he did it. Because although it did jump around rapidly from different perspectives, whether it be first person, third person or taking you on a sideline away from the main plot, I think you always knew exactly where you were.

L: I found it exciting. You know, we’re not cynical readers. But it takes a lot, I think, for me to feel excited by prose. I wasn’t looking forward to reading this book. The Booker shortlist was announced, I knew I was gonna have to read all the books, I read a Guardian article, and it was like ‘death is a consistent theme in all these books’ – I was like, ‘Oh, God, Death? I’m thin-skinned! I don’t want to read about death!’

And so I decided to sample each of the books through Kindle and just see which one hooked me. And this book, which is structured around four deaths and the short term action after each of these deaths, is amazingly gripping. And it’s not depressing, although I have heard other people say they found it quite sad. But the author’s doing something really special here. I mean, I think that’s why he won the Booker.

K: I know in bookclub it was one of the points that people struggled with was this narration and the way it flits about. Maria was saying she didn’t feel it settled long enough for her to really get to know a character before suddenly it takes you off somewhere else.

I think it must just come down to your personal preference because like you, Laura, and Stuart as well, perhaps, I tended to find it exhilarating. I love the way that it would suddenly divert from a major character like Amor, starting the novel opening with her and her perspective as she’s taken out of school. And she’s taken to the house where she knows her mother has died and awful sadness of that.

And then at the wake, suddenly, it flits from these main characters to the side character of this minor priest who’s there and this crisis of faith that he’s having, and it rests on him for just a paragraph and then it jumps away again, but you’ve learned everything you need to know about that character in that brief little vignette. And I loved the way he did that. It felt interesting and exhilarating, and you didn’t quite know where it was going to take you next.

S: I think you’re right, you either love it or hate it. But it’s funny that you should pick up on that moment, because that’s the moment where I suddenly thought this is really intriguing. It was jumping into that character’s head, a character with no real significance in the overarching plot, but it just felt interesting. And at that point, I was like, ‘Yes, I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes.’

K: And they’re not particularly likeable characters. You get this very early on. Amor is the one that you feel the most sympathetic towards. She’s sort of the one who grabs your heart at the beginning, you care about her, and you see this family through her eyes. But of course, quickly, you start to see through other people’s eyes, and the family are revealed to be grasping, petty, self interested, self loathing and deeply racist.

So when Amor goes to the house, she comes to see Salome who has brought her up alongside her mother. To everybody else, it’s very clear very quickly, that she’s just invisible. It’s like they don’t really see her or if they do, they order her around characters will literally say, ‘Don’t worry about her, she doesn’t have any feelings.’

And then this question of race, and the white South Africans and the black South African within their midst, and the way that they feel about that, which because you’re seeing things through their perspective, you feel uncomfortably complicit in, continues throughout the book.

And one of the other questions that came up for my book club felt a bit frustrating, it felt like we didn’t really have time to debate it properly. We didn’t have the knowledge that maybe we needed to really understand what he was trying to achieve. But the criticism that some people levelled at it was that they felt like they were only hearing the white perspective of the story, and that they weren’t hearing the black voices, the black characters weren’t given a voice. And where they did appear, they seemed it to be very stereotyped, they had just gone to jail or were kind of ne’er do wells. To some people in my book club, I think that felt very reductive. And they were disappointed by that.

I didn’t feel like that when I read it, I felt that he was trying to do something more interesting with it. And it was quite subtle what he was trying to do. And on re-reading it, it felt more clear to me that it’s a very deliberate choice that Galgut has made not to have those characters, speaking, not to have them in a position of agency with control over their own stories.

S: I think it was really powerful. The fact that he was completely silent on that. And having, like I said, had a bit more time to investigate and research, it was clearly a decision he made intentionally, there’s a really powerful bit, which ties back to what we’ve already discussed around the changing perspective. Very near the end, Galgut actually says to the reader, ‘If Salome’s home hasn’t been mentioned before, it’s because you have not asked, you didn’t care to know.’ I remember that really hit home that it clearly been left out on purpose.

It was interesting, I mean, drawing a little bit of my mother’s experience. I was asking her about this after the criticism from the book club. And she was quite open. They had help when she was growing up, you know, living with them, living in a room at the bottom of the garden kind of thing. And she said that nobody did pay any interest, no-one asked about the life that these people were leading outside of what they saw. And unfortunately, it seems pretty representative of the white attitude towards those kind of helpers at the time.

K: What I think he does that so remarkable is that it’s not even straightforwardly judgmental about these white South Africans that we’re following throughout this novel. It felt like they themselves are shown to be victims of circumstance, especially as the children grow. This novel follows the passage of decades. And so in that time, Amor grows from a young child to a 45-year-old woman when the story ends, and we see how the unequal society in which they live and were born into it was not of their making. They inherited the situation and they grew up in this situation. And it you see how the guilt of that knowledge of being effectively usurpers in a country that you were born in, I felt was the thing that was sort of shown to be ultimately destroying them, particularly the son, Anton.

He’s been conscripted into the army. So in that very fact about him is something telling, you know, he didn’t choose to go into the army to fight he was conscripted, he was forced to go. Throughout this novel characters are in positions where they’re ending up doing things that they don’t particularly want to do, but that that’s what’s expected of them, or that that’s what they’ve come to expect of themselves. And so that dictates the way that they behave. You couldn’t really be sympathetic towards them because they were just all awful, even Amor, who is arguably the the conscience of the novel. You know, she is the good character in this novel. But even she I think is shown to be somehow flawed because she’s still a part of this system. And there is no solution to centuries of inequality.

S: Isn’t that on the flip side, though, what makes the novel so powerful and the characters so believable the fact that they are complex. I actually felt a real sympathy for Anton. Like you said, he had no choice in being conscripted, he experienced a terrible event that almost set his life going down a completely different path. You don’t fully appreciate the impact that it had on his life until his book is discovered late on. And you see then that event, without wanting to give away any spoilers, has really had a massive impact. He has never really recovered from it and you suddenly realised maybe that’s why he acted in the way he did or why he was the way he was.

K: No, I’m like you, I couldn’t help but like Anton, I did rather like him. And there were moments where he showed flashes of kind of nobility of spirit, where you sort of wanted to say, ‘Yes!’ you know, cheer him on, because he was the only one saying that thing that needed to be said.  Yet ultimately, as with almost all the other characters – but I mean, I think this is why people find it depressing. No one really comes out of it well, and there is something a bit relentlessly downbeat about that.

I did feel that the Amor character was a little bit of a cypher, is it, when a character exists for the purpose of moving the plot along? I would have loved it, if she had had more depth, her story had been more well rounded, you know, she she sort of disappears, she holds herself at a distance, because she has this principle at stake for her, which is if her family will not make good on the promise that she overheard – her mother asked if her father and her father agreed – if the family then won’t make good on this promise, she then sort of withdraws and holds herself apart.

And that’s her way, the only way that she seems to be able to muster to put any kind of pressure on them or exert any influence of her own. But so as a result, she’s quite absent for long stretches of the novel and the absence is in itself, almost like a kind of political act. For me, it left her feeling a bit one-dimensional.

S: I think some of the book group did criticise that character for being a bit too saintly. I think that’s possibly fair. We generally feel that there’s a good explanation for a lot of the choices that he made, but that one I do struggle with.

K: And then this wider political context. And the idea that these people are all living in the aftermath of settler colonialism, which is brought to a head when finally we’re going to find out if the promise is going to be fulfilled, and if the land is going to be given to Salome. And the point is raised, that the land was never theirs to give in the first place, that they themselves stole the land, going back to the original, arguable theft of the land from the people that were living there in the first place, who were not consulted.

I don’t know that much about South Africa. I’ve never been there. I felt like my knowledge was really sketchy. But nonetheless, I’m from England. We colonised the whole of the world, we went tromping around and took things that didn’t belong to us and enriched ourselves in the process. America – an entire nation founded on people who went and took the land away from the Native Americans. Australia, same story! So it taps into even now, you know, if you really consider the privilege that we have and where it comes from, you can’t feel very good about it.

For me, of all the Booker Prize shortlist, it was the one that was grappling with the biggest ideas, the biggest scope of ideas, because it was not just a local story, it somehow managed to be something that I felt was global in the questions that it was raising, and really thought provoking in such a good way, you know, you just feel challenged by it. Why do we read? This is a great story, and you like the characters and it is incredibly as you say, cinematic, and you really feel like you’re there and all the things that you want from a good novel, but it asks something of you as well. And it causes you to question things, which is what you want from art – that’s why I felt for me, it was a very worthy winner.

L: I agree with your point that it makes you think about the global context or maybe it connects with us in a different context. But I also wonder what we miss by not being in South Africa. Is Galgut writing for an international audience? I don’t think he is. He is writing for South Africans. Stuart, do you have any thoughts on that?

S: I tend to agree with you Laura, I certainly felt that it was writing more for local audience, it felt like it had the conviction of an author who wasn’t really trying to go for global stardom and wasn’t trying to pander to an international audience, but was just telling some real truths some of which do travel. I think we haven’t really touched on some of the other themes of the book, mortality and the passage of time, and all of these elements, because I think, Kate, like you said, this book is so layered. There’s so many different ideas in it.

K: Did you mention to me that your mother had read it?

S: Yes. And she was firmly of the opinion that it was completely telling the truth. Like I mentioned the story, you know, the attitude towards some of the black people through the ’60s and ’70s. My dad moved out to South Africa, where he met my mum. And they bought a plot of land out in the middle of what was then nowhere, on the outskirts of Johannesburg. And there was an old black couple living in a tin shed on that piece of land that they bought. So on a very small scale, they lived a similar kind of story to the one told in this book.

And again, my mum said there was no talk of where they’d come from. And they felt that these people were encroaching on their land. And they had this feeling that this black couple thought this white couple were crazy trying to build a house in the middle of nowhere with no running water and electricity. And then out of the blue one day, this couple disappeared, and were never heard of again.

I challenged my mum the same way you guys have been alluding to and said, ‘Well, you know, whose land was it? Really? I mean, you bought that piece of land. But who did you buy it from? And who did they get it from?’ I think those kinds of experiences, there must be a lot of South Africans that had similar experiences throughout the time covered in the book.

K: It is a very dark novel, but at the same time there are these flashes of dark humour that did liven it up for me and sometimes made me smile. It had such a knowing quality to it that I appreciated.

S: I think sometimes it was just so outrageous that you couldn’t help but laugh at some of the attitudes as well.

K: Anton. Occasionally, he felt like the character with the most comic potential.

S: And the aunt as well. She was just so obnoxious at the start!

L: Tannie Marina. And Oom Ockie…

S: [laughs] Exactly! Just horrible people but funny to observe.

K: Well, it may have won the Booker Prize; I may think it was the most extraordinary piece of literature, stroke art, but it did not go down well with book club, I think it’s fair to say – who are open, curious, interested readers. And this book, to my surprise, really fell flat with them.

I think the problem then when you come to read a Booker winner is that you have a certain set of expectations. So then it’s quite easy to be underwhelmed or disappointed. I also think it’s a book that asks something of you, demands something of you as a reader. And it’s not to say that my book club aren’t equal to that kind of reading, because I know that they all are. They’re all extraordinary readers, but they’re also people who are quite busy. And I just felt they hadn’t really had the time to reflect on it and to think about it.

Maybe it wouldn’t have changed anything if they had I mean, you know, as ever, they gave interesting, thoughtful criticism and comments. Perhaps it’s my own disappointment that I had wanted them to see more in this than they did.

Maria gave it two and a half out of five. (That’s crazy!) She said ‘I thought that the way it was written was quite curious, the way he hovered in this way. [This is the narrator.] I did find it interesting to think about South Africa, all the little words that I was unfamiliar with. I found the family story interesting, but at the same time, I didn’t like any of them. And it doesn’t feel like a book that’s going to stay with me at all. The formal brilliance seemed like smoke in your eyes when there’s not that much substance underneath.

Meanwhile, Andy H said it was an ‘OK book that was for me completely overrated. I liked the writing, found it easy to read, but I didn’t care about any of the characters at all. It just didn’t add anything to my experience of what I know about South Africa. I didn’t feel I learned anything from it. And I didn’t really enjoy reading it all that much. I didn’t find the form particularly impressive either. Didn’t feel anything. I didn’t think anything, laughed occasionally. That was about it.’

L: I feel like that’s the curse of the Booker right there. I think that’s Andy, a good friend of mine, being contrary, I feel like if he had discovered it on his own, he would have been like ‘I found this amazing book.’

K: Meanwhile, Amanda said she found it difficult because she loved South Africa. She has travelled there. She said the energy, the diversity, the youthfulness, the variety of it, it was like nowhere she’d ever been. And it had this incredibly powerful effect on her. And she found this novel such a different reflection of that, that she wasn’t seeing the South Africa that she knew and loved. She said there was a slight moment in the novel when the whole nation gets behind the rugby team that felt to her like something of the kind of joyful side, I suppose, of South Africa that she’d experienced. But for the rest, I think it was just very flat and downbeat.

She said, ‘I love the narrative voice hovering. And after our discussion, I’m becoming more aware of the layers of symbolism, because I’d say the other thing is, I think in discussion, as we started to explore some of these topics, I think people will then reflect on it slightly differently, which is interesting, and goes to whether it’ll be a good book club book. But for me, Galgut didn’t give me any insight into humanity that didn’t feel hackneyed, his ideas about women, the way they felt about each other felt tired, it felt prejudiced and limited, and I wanted more from it.’

L: I agree with all of that. But I feel like it’s a portrait of a prejudiced and limited culture, specific to one family on the decline. That diverse, exciting South Africa that Amanda has interacted with is not the subject of this novel. It’s about that old white culture founded on racism and inequality and its kind of disintegration.

S: And as Kate alluded to at the start, there is an element of society, black and white, that do feel betrayed. That the promise in that wider context was never delivered, that everyone was building a new community together. And from their perspective, it has never really happened.

K: Looking online, you get good and bad. Jay Sweetman called it ‘one of the books of the year’ writing: ‘This is a stunning novel and a great read unless perhaps you’re a white South African who is disinclined to support majority rule and thinks your heritage has been stolen. It takes you into the heart of a country, which is often held up as some shining example of democracy in action, and reveals all the complexities which lie behind that easy story. It’s about a promise and how a pledge can be half followed through. And that’s a metaphor as well. It’s also about how civil strife leads terrible scars on a country and its culture. But in all of this, the book avoid sensationalism, and has genuine characters who are multi layered and interesting. It’s one of the best books I’ve read this year and highly recommended.’

But not everyone agrees, Sercan give it two stars, writing ‘It’s not a terrible book, and certainly not the worst on the Booker longlist, but I’m surprised it’s been as well received as it has. It was a bit boring with no tension to propel you forward. The plot was thin, the characters underdeveloped, and I’m not really sure it said anything fresh or interesting. The characters were like puppets, they participate in scenes but they don’t learn change or grow.’

L: Like human beings! [laughs]

K: Penultimate gave it two stars saying ‘I was looking forward to reading this after the Booker Prize and all those great reviews, I found implausible characterisation, lack of coherence, artificial connections to political events, and irritating attempts at humour. One of the characters writes a novel, which is described by another character as having a strong start that loses its way. I would describe The Promise as a novel that has a weak start that never finds its way.’

L: That’s just wrong. The structure of this novel is like rock solid!

S: I agree with you though. Okay, I think out of all of the book club, probably after yourself, I was probably most enthusiastic about this book, but not overly enthusiastic. And I think you hit the nail on the head, I think I’ve really discovered so much more having had this opportunity to revisit it and really spend a bit more time understanding all the layers.

K: It goes to that thing, I think, you know, you can have an experience reading this book on your own. And you can have quite a different experience if you read it and then discuss it. And to me, it definitely enhances and deepens the pleasure to be able to reflect on that and to be challenged and to care. Having those other perspectives makes you sharpen your own viewpoints on it.

L: So a great book club book, perhaps given that it was so divisive. Lots of follow on discussion. Three enthusiasts here.

K: I was going to give the last word to Claire Messud, the author. She says, ‘A surprising number of novelists are very good, few are extraordinary. Like his compatriot J.M. Coetzee, the South African writer Damon Galgut is of this rare company. To praise the novel in its particulars for its seriousness, for its balance of formal freedom and elegance, for its humour, its precision, its human truth seems inadequate and partial. Simply, you must read it. Like other remarkable novels, it is uniquely itself and greater than the sum of its parts. The Promise evokes, when you reach the final page, a profound interior shift that is all but physical. This is an experience of art happens only rarely and is to be prized.’

L: Uniquely itself is the highest praise indeed.

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The Promise

By Damon Galgut

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The Promise charts the crash and burn of a white South African family, living on a farm outside Pretoria. The Swarts are gathering for Ma’s funeral. The younger generation, Anton and Amor, detest everything the family stand for — not least the failed promise to the Black woman who has worked for them her whole life. After years of service, Salome was promised her own house, her own land… yet somehow, as each decade passes, that promise remains unfulfilled.

The narrator’s eye shifts and blinks: moving fluidly between characters, flying into their dreams; deliciously lethal in its observation. And as the country moves from old deep divisions to its new so-called fairer society, the lost promise of more than just one family hovers behind the novel’s title.

In this story of a diminished family, sharp and tender emotional truths hit home. Confident, deft and quietly powerful, The Promise is literary fiction at its finest.

Resources for this book

• Booker Prize 2021 shortlist reading group guides

14 of us gathered (and 3 sent in reviews/comments and scores) to discuss our April 2022 reads which included The Promise. A summary of comments and views :- Enjoyed it enormously - eye opening, detailed portrayal of a decaying regime as epitomised by one white South African Afrikaans family over 4 decades- their arrogance, hypocrisy,complexities of religion and tradition, and the subtleties of oppression. Was Amor really so perfect or just another in this family suffering from trauma?

Narrator breaks the 4th wall and addresses the reader directly at times.

Found the writing style tricky at first - whose viewpoint were we hearing - sometimes the narrator, sometimes inside two different character’s heads in the same passage. Told in the present tense and again no speech marks!

Listening to the BBC Sounds/Book at Bedtime version broadcast over 10x15 minute abridged sections was very helpful and enjoyable.

Enjoyed the humour and some of the eccentricities of some of the obnoxious characters in the family.

A powerful beginning

Read the book in one afternoon. Good structure with each character’s story/viewpoint skilfully woven together. Slight ennui with it being yet another historical novel.

Enjoyed the portrayal of the family members - all damaged and tormented . Women - bored,and unfulfilled lives with no role in life so had affairs, facelifts, shopped, went to meditation classes.

Portrayal of corruption and decay in S African society, the Church, Police, politics and the family. Galgut wrote this story for S Africans to read ( not aimed at being a prize winner) - he is critical, saddened and cynical about the myth of the “rainbow nation”. A country divided and troubled under various regimes- violence, unrest,

Didn't like it at all. Struggled with it and really couldn't get into it. Found the writing style dull

Did The Promise really happen?

Booker prize? Was it a worthy winner? Who decides? Some debate.

Little from the viewpoint of the black community who are portrayed mainly as servants, hijackers, etc but then Galgud’s intention was to focus on the Swart family.

8 of us had read it and we received comments and scores from 3 absent members one of whom is married to a White Afrikaans SAfrican. Total score of 76 with scores ranging from 5 to 9 with an average of 7.6

Clareboucher

I can understand why this won the Booker Prize. With great economy, it reflects on the history of South Africa through an exploration of the fates of a white South African family and a broken promise to Salome, the black woman who works for them. Each of the four parts is structured around a death.

I found that the best way to read this book was to take each part in a single long-ish session. The narrative voice shifts seamlessly from character to character and there are no obvious places within each part to stop that flow. Technically, the novel is highly accomplished.

Black voices are, however, largely absent. I would have liked to know more about what Salome thought. Many of the family members are caricatures and insufficient time is spent with any of them for them to feel fully fleshed out.

I admired the book more than I loved it but would still recommend it.

Thank you to the Reading Agency for supplying copies to Gloucester Book Club

thefirstmrsdewinter

Through four decades in the life (and deaths) of the Swart family Galgut holds a mirror up to society as a whole in post-apartheid South Africa.

The story is told in four sections, each framed around the death and funeral of one of the family. The narration is fluid, switching frequently between points of view. Initially, this felt difficult to follow, especially as some of these transitions are so seamless that they can be easily overlooked, however, it soon became more familiar and I appreciated it as it seemed to add a lyrical, poetic rhythm to the narrative and is done very well. I'm told that this experimental style of writing was born out of a period of time spent writing for screen, which makes a lot of sense, as there is certainly a filmic quality about it that I've not found in other books.

Having little experience or knowledge about South African history, I found the way the novel expressed racial tensions through the characters in the family and those around them, particularly the black servants, was very accessible and thought-provoking. The lack of voice given to the black characters seemed to be a deliberate device used to further impress upon the reader the disparity between them and the Swarts, which some may find jarring considering the setting and political backdrop for this novel, but which I found quite a powerful allegory.

All in all, a worthy winner of the 2021 Booker prize, and also quite possibly the best Booker nominated book that I've read.

ReaderReviews

Review from Diane: I read The Promise as a member of Gloucester Book Club. At first I found the style disconcerting as character names were dropped in without previous reference, causing me to look back ("who is Marcus?", "who is Livingstone?" , "why is the car make funny when you haven't told us what make it is yet?") but it all conveyed presumably the chaos of South Africa at the time. I enjoyed the book more the second time I read it as I could relax and enjoy the immersion into the setting without trying to decipher the characters and plot. The structure of four deaths approximately ten years apart, four seasons, four different religious ceremonies, had a pleasing symmetry. The characters were well delineated, although I didn't get much sense of Salome and would have liked more development of her character even if through the eyes of the other characters. I realise the author didn't give her her own voice as a metaphor for the way black South Africans were treated. The changing political climate was conveyed well in each segment. I didn't understand why Salome wasn't given her shack as promised when it was legal to do so as the siblings apparently did want to, but assume that this mirrors the broken promises of whites to blacks in South Africa. An engaging read with a good sense of place.

Christina58

Read with Gloucester Book Club in conjunction with the Reading Agency and the book’s editor, Clara Farmer. The Promise is an extraordinarily accomplished novel about a dysfunctional white South African family, spanning several decades from the 80s. It centres around a promise made to Salome, the family’s long-standing black servant.

It’s a challenging read, asking readers to question and reflect, with an array of characters who are flawed and complicated, and not particularly likeable. With unusual narration from almost all characters, it zooms in and out rather like a camera in a film - occasionally turning to the reader to ask questions and to make them take note.

Much has been asked about why Salome has no voice in the novel. This has been explained by author Damon Galgut as deliberate. He wants to draw attention to the fact that even now, post-apartheid, many black people remain unnoticed and have no voice. It reminded me of another South African Booker Prize winner, ‘Disgrace’ by JM Coetzee.

One of the many advantages of winning the Booker is that it catapults the author and South African literature into the limelight. It’s a remarkable novel and a timely winner.

Chamwells Chums Book Club Gloucester

I read The Promise with Gloucester Book Club, through the generosity of Penguin Random House UK and The Reading Agency, on the basis of a free copy for a fair review.

The Promise, by South African author Damon Galgut, is the winner of the 2021 Booker Prize.

Superficially, this is a family saga. The Promise charts the downfall of an entitled, racist, white South African family over 4 family funerals and 30 years odd following the collapse of the Apartheid regime. A family which is a product of its time and whose time is ending rapidly and dramatically. The novel draws us into their many internal family issues and frailties, focusing on the family’s reluctance to honour the promise apparently extracted from the patriarch, by the dying mother, to give their black servant, Salome, the house she occupies on the family farm.

However, on a higher, political level, the unfulfilled promise seems to be much more than just the promise about Salome’s house; rather, a metaphor more generally for the failure of the post-apartheid “Rainbow Nation” promise to black South Africans of a meaningful democracy, opportunity and prosperity for all.

The characterisation of family members is very well observed and the changes in each of them are well portrayed and believable.

Galgut employs a narrative voice which, very cleverly, bounces about everywhere, flits between first and third person, and acts like a hyperactive Greek Chorus with witty and judgmental asides to the reader. This is very enjoyable, at times funny, then accusatory, and goes outside normal story-telling conventions. There is a cinematic feel to this voice, which may have been influenced by Galgut’s break, during writing this novel, to write two screenplays.

The elephant in the room throughout is Salome and the absence of her voice, her story. Although I would have liked to know more about her life, I accept the reasoning given by Galgut for telling us very little about her: the greater importance of portraying her as invisible; in the way that, to most white South Africans, even post Apartheid, the blacks are “invisible”, do not count and do not have a voice.

I thoroughly enjoyed "The Promise" and all the discussions we had in book club around it. I would highly recommend it to other readers.

Flawless and very clever storytelling. Damon Galgut manages to write an engrossing tale that is interesting, entertaining and very thought provoking but also sharply political without being heavy or preachy. It is beautifully observed with just the right amount of attention to detail. Set in sunny South Africa the novel charts the gradual downfall of a well off white farming family which in turn, through all the complications, regulations and implications illuminates the simultaneous dismantling of apartheid. A brilliant book.

I wasn't sure what to expect from this book but I found myself riveted by it. The author manages to handle bleak and politically-charged themes with a lightness of touch which prevents the book from becoming depressing or heavy-going. Through the complex, believable characters the author shines a light on South Africa's ongoing process of coming to terms with its history and its present.

I found The Promise very interesting in terms of its characters, narrative devices and the structure. Its narrative keeps switching perspective, sometimes with a third person narrator and sometimes from the point of view of a character, chopping and changing rapidly between them. At times the narrative voice is very playful, stating one thing and then changing it, for example, stating there was a cat and then that there was not a cat. This is a fascinating device making us question the story but also to see events from multiple points of view. It tells the story of a South African farming family at 4 different points in time, at 4 family funerals. This is fascinating in showing the change in characters over time, and the change in their relationships with each other and those outside the family, as well as the change in South Africa's turbulent history. We think it might win the Booker Prize!

I've come only recently to reading novels, and this is the best I've read so far. I wonder if it is because the family dynamics feel so real and reflect much of my own experience: siblings being so completely different and unable to understand each other; being unable to allow each other to change and grow; being unable even to talk about the things which are so deeply felt. I also found it helpful to really get inside the head of each character - somehow the style of first/third person and its fluidity helped with that.

I related a lot to Amor as my daughter has described to me how neurodiversity impacts on how you see and experience the world, and it felt like there was a lot of similarity between my daughter's descriptions and way of seeing the world, and Amor's, so for me this felt like the most attractive of the characters. Also, the irony for me of Amor living the most Christian values, whereas those who professed to be operating from their religious perspectives appear to be the most distant from them.

I found the wider picture of South Africa, and how the gradual shifts in attitudes were reflected in the changing family situation interesting and powerful. But change is slow, corruption so endemic, and racist attitudes so entrenched that even the ray of hope that Amor shone one could imagine being snuffed out easily.

Some of the main protagonists seem to have almost brought about their own demise: Pa through his obsession with his reptiles and misplaced expression of faith; Astrid through flaunting the thing (her posh car) which was the epitome of the rich lifestyle that she so desired; Anton through his inability to face himself and continually running away from himself to the extent that he could see no future. Yet Amor appeared to be able to accept herself, give herself to others and through delivering on the promise provide hope and a future. In a way her lifestyle of almost drifting, but directed by giving, contrasted so strongly with Anton's drifting which was directed by a running away from things.

I really enjoyed the book, and found it a fascinating read on many different levels.

This novel paints a depressing view of South African society from the 1960s during the tensions of the end of apartheid. Religious division is shown through the family central to the plot, exemplifying racism, greed, political corruption, and hypocrisy. Amor, whose story begins and ends the narrative thinks differently from her father and siblings, that a promise made to their servant should be honoured, that she should have ownership of the hovel in which she and her son live. Each dysfunctional character is tellingly portrayed, and life on a farm in the African veldt near Pretoria is well-described, so that scenes come alive to the reader. Marjorie Leitch St Barbara’s Book Group

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