The Promise by Damon Galgut

I reviewed this prize-winning book for the summer edition of Journal Magazine and would like to share it here on Book Chats with Salome.

South African born and bred, Damon Galgut has certainly done his country proud. He is the delighted new owner of a little-known trinket called the Booker Prize for his novel, The Promise, a portrait of a white South African family navigating the end of apartheid. Only the third South African to claim this prestigious award, Galgut follows in the hallowed footsteps of Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee.

The Booker judges praised The Promise as ‘a spectacular demonstration of how the novel can make us see and think afresh’. I came away from it with the same sentiments. The author, on the other hand, said upon receiving the award that he doesn’t really believe that novels can change the world. Rather, Galgut says, novels tell you how it feels to be alive at a particular moment in history and are therefore more records than agents of change.

Applying an unusual construction and narrative style – reminiscent of Faulkner’s stream-of-consciousness approach – Galgut uses modernistic literary prose unencumbered by convention or syntax which, ultimately, and even somewhat surprisingly, facilitates the seamless flow of both thought and dialogue.

Gloomy, though sporadically relieved by timely humour, The Promise is a family saga set during the turbulent years of South Africa’s transformation, spanning almost four decades under four different Presidents from 1986. The hapless Swart family, descendants of Dutch settlers, farm outside Pretoria and live mostly off the profit of a snake park. After Mrs Swart passes away, the family starts falling apart. Their already strained relations are further impacted by an unkept promise and exacerbated as their changing environments shape their respective realities.

As someone who experienced those years through a white person’s eyes, I admit I found myself relating (not always comfortably) with much of the Swart family’s challenges as they navigate the dynamic shifts of power from a ‘previously privileged’ position. Galgut himself describes the Swart family as ‘a kind of amalgamation of everything I grew up with in Pretoria. A mix of English and Afrikaans, and a hodgepodge of creeds and beliefs, too. Not unusual for this part of the world. But what makes them “representative” isn’t their characters, it’s the times they’re living through’.

The titular promise that the family fails to keep is to give Salome – the black domestic worker who had worked for the Swart family for decades and practically raised all three children – the house she had been living in. The three Swart siblings are only united on four further occasions: four funerals spaced roughly a decade apart, each performed to differing religious customs. The siblings include firstborn Anton who bitterly resents his life’s unfulfilled potential, middle child Astrid who places great stock in her looks and suffers from an eating disorder, and youngest Amor who remains an enigma and is seemingly racked by feelings of guilt.

The shifts in the Swart family reflect those of the country and the times they live in, and the family’s emotions run the same gamut: hurtling from resentment and despair to anger and revenge, and finally to reconciliation and hope. Emotions that most South Africans who experienced the transformation would recognise and identify with.

A cast comprised mostly of dysfunctional individuals ill-equipped for life, much less change, serve the narrative of The Promise rather well. Emblematic of a deeply complex country, many of its old wounds hitherto unmended, Galgut’s novel cuts to the core of many of South Africa’s most glaring issues, past and present. A masterpiece, certainly, and must-read material for South Africans young and old.