book review the promise by damon galgut

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The Promise by Damon Galgut review – legacies of apartheid

The Booker-shortlisted novelist examines South Africa’s broken promises over the last three decades through the story of one white family

I n Damon Galgut ’s 2008 book The Impost or , a man named Adam loses his job and moves to a shack in the Karoo to try to write poetry. Like Galgut himself , who wrote his debut novel, A Sinless Season , when he was 17, Adam’s first collection – “poems about the natural world, ardent and intense and romantic” – was published when he was a young man. But Adam has become aware of the weight of history since then, and wonders whether such poetry is acceptable in contemporary South Africa:

When his first collection had come out he’d been astounded by one especially vitriolic review, which had charged him with deliberately avoiding the moral crisis at the heart of South Africa. He’d had no ideological project in mind with his pursuit of Beauty, and he’d been stung at the suggestion that he was indifferent to suffering. But in his weakest moments he reflected privately that maybe it was true; maybe he didn’t care enough for people.

The fall of apartheid promised to give South African novelists licence to write, as Galgut said in an interview in 2003, about “things like love … which would have been considered slightly immoral as a theme until apartheid crashed”, but his own novels have only become more politically engaged over the course of his career. His early works were sometimes criticised – like Adam’s poetry – for abnegating their moral responsibilities. Both A Sinless Season (1982), a novel of boyhood cruelty set in a young offenders’ prison (Galgut has since disavowed it), and the novella which formed the backbone of his collection Small Circle of Beings (1988) – a stark domestic miniature about a mother caring for her ill child – were precocious and emotionally perceptive, but neither seemed particularly interested in the world outside themselves.

Since the mid 1990s, he has been more willing directly to tackle the legacies of apartheid in his fiction. In The Good Doctor , which was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2003, a cynical South African doctor is challenged by a naively ideological new colleague. In a Strange Room – which was shortlisted for the Booker in 2010, and is by far Galgut’s best novel – is an autofiction in which a man named Damon goes on three journeys in Europe, Africa and India, bearing his nationality like a stain on his back. His most recent book, Arctic Summer , was a historical novel about a decade in the life of EM Forster , but even here the tension between individual innocence – or ignorance, or indifference – and the sweep of history is evident.

The Promise is one of Galgut’s most directly political novels. It is also one of his most formally inventive, borrowing many of the narrative techniques he developed so effectively in In a Strange Room . If the results are mixed, this might be because the novel sometimes strives too hard to present a balanced collective perspective, or because it fails to reconcile aesthetic with moral questions. It’s not that it’s at all crude, or simplistic; more that the injustices it wants to examine are rendered slightly inert by the intrusion of something like a conscience – a narrator – in moments which might have been more effective if left unresolved.

The novel is divided into four sections, beginning in the mid-1980s, during the state of emergency that marked the height of apartheid, and ending in 2018. The Swarts are a white family who own a ramshackle farm deep in the veldt. The head of the family is Herman “Manie” Swart, an unreconstructed racist who runs a reptile park called Scaly City and has recently found religion. His wife, Rachel, has converted (or reverted) to Judaism on her deathbed, and her death marks the beginning of the book. She leaves behind three children: Anton, Astrid and Amor.

The “promise” of the title is a literal one, made by Rachel before she dies: to give a house on the farm to their black servant, Salome. It’s also a metaphorical one. Over the years, as members of the family find reasons to deny or defer Salome’s inheritance, the moral promise – the potential, or expectation – of the next generation of South Africans, and of the nation itself, is shown to be just as compromised as that of their parents.

In its themes The Promise aspires to a Joycean universalism, and stylistically too, this is a neo-modernist novel. The narrator occupies an indistinct space, halfway between first and third person, drifting from tight focus on a single character to a more piercing, detached view, often within a single paragraph. There’s plenty of free indirect discourse, and sections written in something approaching Joycean stream of consciousness.

Galgut is too good a writer to really mess any of this up, but the gears do grind occasionally when the focus shifts between characters. “Astrid on the line”, thinks Anton, rather too helpfully, when his sister calls him. “He can hear it’s her, though only bits of words are coming through. Probably on that new mobile phone of hers, so proud of it, useless heavy brick with buttons. Not an invention that’s going to last.” The irony isn’t subtle in these moments, and consequently the characterisation can feel slightly crude. But then, Anton is a crude man. Occasionally the effect is more jarring. When an old aunt’s disappointment is described as “almost palpable, like a secret fart”, or when Amor is described as feeling “ugly when she cries, like a tomato breaking open”, it’s not clear whether the similes belong to the characters themselves, to the characters observing them, or to an external narrator.

At other times it’s clear who’s doing the talking. After Rachel’s death, Salome offers a prayer. “Oh God. I hope You can hear me. It is me, Salome. Please welcome the madam where You are and look after her carefully, because I wish to see her again one day in heaven.” A bit later the narrator intervenes: “Perhaps she doesn’t pray in these words, or in any words at all, many prayers are uttered without language and they rise like all the rest. Or perhaps she prays for other things, because prayers are secret in the end, and not all to the same God.” The moment is telling for the way the novel wants to be able to speak on Salome’s behalf while simultaneously disavowing any hope of doing so. Perhaps this is just one more example of Salome’s disenfranchisement – no home, no voice, no narrated inner life. But novels are made of words, and it does seem doubly cruel – or, at least, too easy – to deny Salome even this degree of self-expression.

For Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, history was a “nightmare from which I am trying to awake”, and in Galgut’s novels too, history exists independently of the individuals who are inevitably shaped by it. In The Impost or , Adam recalls that when black students were first accepted into his school, he became “aware of history impinging on his existence”, which is an odd way of putting it, and might reveal more about his views than he – with his uninterrogated liberal values – can admit to himself. In The Promise , the 13-year-old Amor can’t understand that her mother’s promise to Salome will not be kept because, the narrator says, “history has not yet trod on her”. That’s one way of looking at history – as an external force that comes for you when you least expect it, and against which it’s impossible to take a stand. But it’s not the only way.

Galgut is a terrifically agile and consistently interesting novelist, certainly up there with Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee as a chronicler of his nation’s anguished complexity. And in trying to navigate the demands of being a South African writer and being a writer who just happens to be South African, The Promise is a fascinating, if inevitably partial, achievement. But while reading it I sometimes wished Galgut would return to the smaller frame of In a Strange Room , and remember that it’s not an abnegation of one’s artistic responsibilities to paint with a small brush, and attend to personal rather than historic dramas.

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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

Damon galgut.

293 pages, Hardcover

First published April 6, 2021

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For there is nothing unusual or remarkable about the Swart family, oh no, they resemble the family from the next farm and the one beyond that, just an ordinary bunch of white South Africans, and if you don’t believe it then listen to us speak. We sound no different from other voices, we sounds the same and we tell the same stories, in an accent squashed underfoot, all the consonants decapitated and the vowels stove in.

And as they drive away, Rachel’s body is already being lifted into its final container and the lid screwed down. For ever. The shomer is in attendance and when the other assistants have gone he continues to sit in his lonely chair against the wall, chanting the tehillim. For the dead must have company all the way to the end.

The need to fuck like bonobos is uppermost these days and he certainly came here today for no noble reason. Only one thing on my mind since hearing about Ma, funny that, just how it works, Eros fighting Thanatos, except you don’t think about sex, you suffer it. A scratchy, hungry thing going on in the basement. Torment of the damned, the fire that never goes out. But still, despite bodily appetites, he feels that he’s chasing some emotion he can’t quite name. Might even be love, though that would surprise him.

It isn't much, she says. I know that. Three rooms and a broken roof. On a tough piece of land. Yes. But for the first time, it'll belong to your mother. Her name on the title deed. Not my family's. That isn't nothing. Yes, Salome agrees, speaking Setswana. It isn't nothing. It is nothing, Lukas says. Smiling again, in that cold, furious way. It's what you don't need any more, it's what you don't mind throwing away. Your leftovers. That's what you're giving my mother, thirty years too late. As good as nothing.

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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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New York Times Bestseller

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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by Percival Everett ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 19, 2024

One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.

Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.

This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.

Pub Date: March 19, 2024

ISBN: 9780385550369

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024

LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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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

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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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Four funerals and a farm

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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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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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Book Review

The Promise by Damon Galgut

the winner of the Booker Prize 2021

Title: The Promise

Author: Damon Galgut

Publisher: Chatto & Windus

Genre: Historical Fiction, Literary fiction

First Publication: 2021

Language:  English

Major Characters: Manie, Anton, Astrid, Amor, Salome, Rachel

Setting Place: South Africa, Pretoria (South Africa)

Book Summary: The Promise by Damon Galgut

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.

Book Review: The Promise by Damon Galgut

The winner of the Booker Prize 2021, The Promise by Damon Galgut, is a literary classic and an engrossing tale of a white South African family’s downfall and collapse. It’s both a tragicomic family picture and a metaphor for the terrible treatment of Blacks during and after apartheid.

On a farm near Pretoria in 1986, the Swarts were a typical white family with three children. The title of the book alludes to the promise made by Manie to his Jewish wife Rachel (overheard by their daughter Amor) that the Black family maid Salome will get to inherit the tiny house she currently lives in. After Rachel’s death, Amor reminds her father of this promise, but he doesn’t remember it and pushes her away. Over the course of four decades, the Swart siblings, Anton (eldest), Astrid (middle), and Amor (youngest), must deal with the repercussions of Apartheid in their own unique ways. Damon Galgut told the story of a family torn apart by a broken promise to Salome, the maid.

The whole story is divided into four parts. The four chapters are roughly a decade apart, and each is named after a deceased figure. The matter of Salome’s inheritance is ignored, passed on, or put off in each section. Meanwhile, characters meet an unfortunate death, often violently. Each part features one character dying and those left behind struggling with the circumstances and pondering the deceased’s personalities and roles. Everyone in this dysfunctional family is yearning for redemption, but they go about it in very different ways. While the characters suffer, the political environment around them is changing swiftly, and it is difficult to say that they are progressive-for the most part, they stay indifferent, with Amor consciously seeking confrontation with personal sorrow.

“As she starts to read, the book travels into her from a long distance, from his mind to mine, across a gap in time, and now she’s not in the room any more, she’s inside the sentences, one joined to the next like a series of tunnels, connected to each other at angles.”

The time period covered stretches from 1986 to 2018, thirty-four years after Rachel’s death. The novel takes place against the backdrop of major political and social upheaval in South Africa, and Galgut is subtle and ingenious in his use of (all too well-known) events to prompt the reader to reflect on the wider picture that is reshaping the country. After being freed in 1990, Nelson Mandela “has gone from jail to throne”. The iconic 1995 World Cup rugby triumph and President Mbeki’s inauguration are interwoven throughout the Swart family saga; the book finishes with a national celebration upon President Zuma’s resignation in 2018. The Swart family is a direct reflection of these shifts in the political environment, as farms are increasingly being targeted and overt luxury comes with its own set of dangers.

From the start, there is an overarching feeling of deterioration and dysfunction in the Swart family. The story is chronological, however it is interspersed with shifting internal monologues for each character, frequently switching points of view within the same paragraph. This style is suggestive of James Joyce’s and emphasises the disjunction of both the family and society as a whole. Surprisingly, no recurrent black point of view is portrayed throughout the work. This absence, I believe, is intentional, emphasising the lack of cohesiveness in post-apartheid society.

“Odd how certain people, often random individuals, can pulse with significance in your thoughts, your dreams”

Galgut accomplishes many things in this book. The Promise is a fantastic piece of literature on the level of sentence structure, portraying vivid images of rural South Africa and evoking the family’s fears. Apart from fluidly switching points of view, he also shifts between time and location without a pause in the flow of the story; this gives the writing an irresistible momentum. In addition, he offers a fascinating look at South Africa’s post-Apartheid history. In spite of the fact that Galgut’s story is told from a white family’s perspective, he manages to capture the optimism that South Africans felt in the mid-’90s, to the gradual disillusionment and disappointment as the ANC’s promises of economic equality have descended into violence and corruption, with the white population eager to keep hold of their apartheid-earned wealth.

With an acute sense of rhythm, The Promise is a compelling novel, energetically telling the story and giving voice to its characters using a variety of literary techniques that the author appears to know well. A generational narrative of disillusionment and lost hope in post-Apartheid South Africa, via the viewpoint of a white family unwilling to do the right thing, dragged down by their stubbornness in giving up the old ways. The prose portrays the drama of the story pretty effectively throughout; a number of tone shifts, arranged in well-thought-out parts, appear like colours on a painting and give an important element of contrast to the narrative. Damon Galgut’s story appears to follow an intriguing and mysterious country’s rich and impressive literary history. In every way, The Promise lives up to its name and more.

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Aug 22 The Promise

Author: Damon Galgut Publisher: Europa Editions Goodreads | The StoryGraph

Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop , which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here .

Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

A modern saga that could only have come from South Africa, written in gorgeous prose that could only come from the pen of literary giant and Booker Prize-shortlisted author, Damon Galgut.

The Promise is the story of the Swart family—theirs is a story of failed possibilities, much like the history of their country. Haunted by an unmet promise made to the family servant, the well-to-do Swarts lose touch after the death of their mother.

Reunited by three funerals over three decades, the dwindling family reflects the charged atmosphere of post-apartheid South Africa in a family drama that unfurls against the unrelenting march of national history.

TL;DR Review

I’m really glad I read The Promise , which brings South Africa from the end of Apartheid to the present day to life on the page, vividly and impressively. Damon Galgut is obviously a masterful writer.

For you if: You are interested in recent South African history, and/or just want a really great literary fiction read.

Full Review

I read The Promise for two reasons: first, on my good friend @bernie.lombardi ’s recommendation, and second, because it was longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize (as Bernie expected!). I’m glad I did; this is a good one.

The story takes place in South Africa over about 30 years, from almost the end of Apartheid to pretty much modern day. (Bernie sent some great links for short background reading on South Africa that were really helpful: here , here , and here .) It follows one dwindling white family, focusing on the four times they came together for funerals.

The narration is one of the things that really makes this novel stand out. Reading this book is probably the closest I’ve ever come to reading water. The narration flows and jumps from person to person without pause, sometimes mid-paragraph or even mid-sentence, sometimes landing on nobody at all but rather an omniscient voice. There are no section breaks for stretches of ~90 pages. But it’s not a drag; rather, it has a propulsive momentum. I found myself meaning to get up and turn on the light for like half an hour, having found no good moment to pause.

The novel is full of plenty of layers and metaphors; it’s one of those where the title has several different meanings, which I love. It examines patriotism amidst progress, race and power, and whether we applaud those who do the bare minimum. It brings South Africa at this period of history to life on the page in a visceral, unflinching way.

If you like literary historical fiction and family sagas, this one might be for you!

Content Warnings

Bulemia (graphic), fatphobia

Gun violence / murder

Racism (era of Apartheid)

Aug 29 Feral Creatures (Hollow Kingdom, #2)

Aug 20 A Passage North

Booker Prize winner 2021: The Promise by Damon Galgut review – a peculiar apartheid allegory

The South African novelist grapples with a society riven by differences in this bleak, unconsoling book – while also cracking the odd joke

Damon Galgut’s first, and precocious, novel was published in 1982. That means he has now been writing long enough to have claimed for himself a characteristic set of themes. How to live with integrity in a country, South Africa, with so chequered a recent history? How to respond to the disappointments of workaday politics once the heady days of the new republic have passed? He shares with his better known compatriots Nadine Gordimer and J M Coetzee an unrelenting moral seriousness, a striving for a vision of the world without illusions. His fiction rarely descends to humour; when it does, he prefers the mordant and bleak to the merely amusing. Galgut’s last novel, Arctic Summer (2014), was a fictionalised account of the gestation of A Passage to India during E M Forster’s travels in the subcontinent. The book’s principal achievement was the seamless integration of archival research with imaginative reconstruction. Galgut made good use of novelistic licence to evoke the repressed romantic yearning of Forster’s middle age, but ended up flattening the man’s wit and humour into a grey pallor. The finest achievement of his career so far is In a Strange Room (2010), a book that made the Booker shortlist. A South African writer called Damon backpacks, in successive sections, through Europe, southern Africa and India, nursing a mysterious trauma that his travels do nothing to heal. Its formal novelties – the flitting between first- and third-person narration, the use of landscape as a metonym for the inner life of its characters – made for a genuinely exciting, unpredictable book. 

His new novel, The Promise , winner of this year’s Booker Prize, returns to the terrain of such earlier novels as The Good Doctor (2004) and The Impostor (2008). The book has moments of great potency, but the results of Galgut’s formal experiments this time are more mixed.  

The Promise begins in South Africa in the last decade of apartheid, with a family of white Afrikaners, the (ironically named) Swarts, mourning the death of Rachel, the matriarch. The promise of the title is, in its most literal form, the one that Rachel elicits from her soon-to-be-widower Manie, that Salome, the black woman who nursed her during her final illness, will be made the owner of the small house she lives in on the family estate. But the keeping of the promise is repeatedly deferred. The Swarts are unable to acknowledge what they owe Salome, and the unkept promise turns into a constant symbol of their moral decline. The honourable exception to the Swarts’ faithlessness is Amor, the youngest of the Swart children, a child when the novel begins. As her siblings Anton and Astrid slowly embrace their own turpitude, growing into a tawdry middle age, Amor works as a nurse caring for HIV patients, as if in an attempt to expiate the sin of the unkept promise that is always on her conscience. Galgut’s tracing of the spiritual decline of one family is evidently supposed to be emblematic. The Swarts’ promise to Salome is supposed, one takes it, to be read as the promise of white South Africans to black South Africans. And the allegory – if that is what it is – is played out against the background of recent events. Rugby matches, episodes of Dallas and references to the political stories of the day (the rise and fall Mandela, Mbeki, Zuma, the revelations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission) tell us where we are in recent history.

What gives the prose in The Promise its special flavour is the peculiar (in every sense) narrative voice, dipping in and out of the consciousness of characters, losing itself for pages in the internal monologue of a minor figure, commenting sardonically on proceedings like a bawdier Greek chorus. Just occasionally, Galgut allows himself a joke, or a scatological metaphor – he is fond of references to excrement and flatulence – but his jokes are not the sort to raise, or strive for, a laugh.

Whether one likes this book – and it isn’t always clear that liking it is quite what Galgut wants – will turn entirely on what one makes of this voice. It is opinionated, digressive, judgmental. It holds the characters to account for their delusions and self-deceptions, as an all-knowing God with an acid wit and Galgut’s politics might do. 

“In a brief lapse of probity forty years ago,” we are told in passing about one pair of minor characters, “Alwyn Simmers and his sister committed the sin of fornication, unfortunately with each other”. The terminal phrase is there to ironise what would otherwise be a shocking, if melodramatic, revelation. But what would we make of someone who actually sounded like that? 

Time and again, characters are pronounced “sententious” or “insufferable”, but the accusing voice and perspective are never themselves brought up for questioning. Why should it (and the author whose outlook it must express) get a free pass when the characters are given so rough a time? It may mark a deep temperamental difference between readers how they feel about being talked at by it for 300 pages.  There are neither villains nor likeable characters in The Promise , only profiles in moral failure. Even the sainted Amor, ever trying to do the right thing, is put in her place by a black man she knew as a boy: “Everything you have, white lady, is already mine. I don’t have to ask.” She can only reply: “I have a name. You used to know it.” For once, the obtrusive narrative voice is silent, leaving us to ponder this irony for ourselves. One wishes it allowed us to do that more often. The unkept promise and the symbolic house are, as Galgut certainly knows, central to Forster’s Howards End . But that book’s mysterious motto, “Only connect”, has little to offer the characters of The Promise . Their society is riven by differences even harder to overcome than those of class. 

Galgut’s motto is the one that haunts the final pages of A Passage to India : “Not yet”. Modern South Africa was built on a dream of truth, to be followed by reconciliation. To the white South African anxious for absolution, Galgut says: not yet. There are harsh truths to be confronted first, some of them told, if a little blaringly, in this unconsoling book.   The Promise is published by Chatto & Windus at £16.99. To order your copy for £14.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop

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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.

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 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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