BOOK OF THE DAY
The Promise by Damon Galgut review – a curse down the decades
This bravura novel about the undoing of a bigoted South African family during apartheid deserves awards
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D
amon Galgut’s stunning new novel charts the decline of a white family during South Africa’s transition out of apartheid. It begins in 1986, with the death of Rachel, a 40-year-old Jewish mother of three on a smallholding outside Pretoria. The drama of the novel turns on a promise that her Afrikaner husband, Manie, made to her before she died, overheard by their youngest daughter, Amor: that Manie would give their black maid, Salome, the deeds to the annexe she occupies. Now that Rachel is dead, Manie has apparently forgotten and doesn’t care to be reminded. Nor does his bigoted family, who regard Amor’s stubborn insistence that Salome should own her home as the kind of talk that “now appears to have infected the whole country”.
Manie’s failure to keep his word falls like a curse as we follow his children down the decades. Four sections, set at roughly 10-year intervals, from Botha to Zuma via the 1995 Rugby World Cup and Mbeki’s inauguration, are each named after a family member who will die; even once you’ve twigged the significance of the section titles, Galgut steals the breath with his willingness to fell his characters so randomly. Amor’s bulimic sister, Astrid, unhappily married with twins, becomes a social climber who, lured by proximity to power, cheats on two husbands; their older brother, Anton, lives in the shadow of an unrecognised crime committed while a teenage conscript deployed against black protesters during the violence of the 1980s.
Galgut’s varying tone wrongfoots us almost right away when we’re told, of someone whose barbed comment fails to land, that their disappointment is “palpable, like a secret fart”. His third-person narration darts between characters, mid-paragraph or even mid-sentence, swooping over the action to itemise someone’s secret fears, or how many times (and what) a household’s toilets flush over a two-hour period. Lines of dialogue can appear next to each other, separated by slashes, as if there are more pressing matters. “You get the idea,” the narrator says, almost impatiently.
From Rachel’s ghost, to the words of a mourning prayer trying to find her, there’s little that is off-limits to the narrator, who addresses an implied Afrikaner reader whose presumed prejudices are cited by way of apology for the book’s emphases – at one point we’re told that we haven’t heard much about Salome because we didn’t care to ask. As that suggests, Galgut deploys every trick in the book; he’s heart-swellingly attentive to emotional complexity, but isn’t above cheap shots. When Manie’s insufferable sister compares having to leave Rachel’s funeral early (because, agonisingly, Amor gets her first period during the service) to the time that her husband forgot to tape the who-shot-JR? episode of Dallas, you can all but see Galgut grinningly beckoning us up beside him on his lofty perch.
Yet for all its satirical tendencies, this isn’t a book that leaves you comfortable in your certainties, not least because Manie’s bad faith isn’t the only thing undermining his promise. At the time that the book begins, South African law means Salome couldn’t own the property even if Manie wished her to; and by the end, the state’s reconceived idea of justice means there’s a prior historical claim to the land – in other words, Salome could get the house and still be evicted. The final pages dizzyingly highlight the whiff of wish-fulfilment in Amor’s dogged quest for restitution: the cathartic climax unfolds with the caveat that none of it can actually be happening, but the mark of the novel’s narrative magic is that the admission doesn’t cancel the effect, but doubles it.
The jacket copy calls The Promise “literary fiction at its finest” – the tagline, it so happens, of the Booker prize, for which Galgut has twice been shortlisted – for The Good Doctor and In a Strange Room. Yes, prize tips are a mug’s game, if for no reason other than they tend to sink a book’s chances with independent-minded judges, but I’ll say it anyway: don’t be surprised if Galgut goes one better this year.
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