The Promise

by Damon Galgut

South African writer Damon Galgut won the 2021 Booker Prize for The Promise, his brilliant, modernist novel that depicts a family’s natural downward progression right after the end of apartheid.  Set in the legacy of colonialism and apartheid, this is a tale of what it is like to live at moments in time in each of the next four decades for a family descended from Dutch settlers.  The story begins with the funeral of the Swart family’s matriarch in 1986, and builds around the funeral of another family member in each of the next three decades.

 At the center of the story is an unmet promise to make the loyal, compliant family servant the owner of her long-time home on the family’s farm.

Its powerful focus on a promise that divides the family, even as it reunites them to bury their kin, echoes in some ways the unrelenting course of history that begins during the hopeful Mandela Presidency and moves far from optimism to the disappointments of the Jacob Zuma Presidency of 2009 to 2018, when Galgut was writing the book.

Galgut adopted a camera as narrator for this novel after he worked on a film script.  With this technique the author says he learned from Faulkner, the narrator inhabits the voice of characters in the story, and moves at great distance from them as well.  There are abrupt jumps in point of view, changes in tone from warm to cold, from deep insight to none.  We learn the private thoughts of members of the family.  But the voice of Salome, the maid, projects only what the family sees.  She has no presence beyond her service.

It is her son Lucas who shows the importance of time in this novel.  Born after Mandela’s Presidency, Lucas expresses the rage of the radicalized upwelling of youth that after all, nothing has changed.  A commitment by the one surviving Swart family member to hand over the deed to his mother is too little too late for Lucas.

This is a compelling story of four distinct national spirits during a time of change in South Africa’s political system.  Underlying the author’s tale of family disharmony is the weight of economic and political issues, attitudes towards race, and the meaning of land.  In an interview with James Wood of the New Yorker, Galgut said his purpose was to show things as they are, and that he does not write as an agent of change.  Asked for his view of the corruption, shortages and power outages that have plagued his nation, he said, “We could be better.”           

Jane Weingarten