Damon Galgut’s electrifying new novel tracks the travails of the Swart family – “just an ordinary bunch of white South Africans” – over the span of three decades.
The story opens in 1986 with Rachel, the matriarch, dying of cancer at 40. On her deathbed she has her husband, Manie, promise to give their housekeeper, Salome, ownership of the small house she occupies on the family farm outside Pretoria. The conversation is overhead by their youngest daughter Amor, who spends the rest of the book trying to have her mother’s dying wish honoured. She is refused first by her father, partly under the pretence that under apartheid, Salome can’t own property, then her siblings, even once it becomes legally possible to transfer the deeds.
The failure to do the right thing rains down like a biblical curse on the Swarts. Each of the four sections is named after a family member who dies: after Ma comes Pa, as Manie succumbs to a snake bite while trying to beat a Guinness world record for living among poisonous serpents in his reptile park, Scaly City. (You couldn’t make it up . . . but Galgut somehow has.)
The family’s moral failings are not confined to the unkept bequest. Manie, who found religion when Amor was struck by lightning as a child, is devout but amoral: in addition to denying Salome her due, he tries to thwart Rachel’s wish to be buried in a Jewish cemetery. The eldest brother, Anton, who deserted his military service after killing a black female protester, ends up a drunken wannabe novelist. The other sister, Astrid, is a social climber who cheats on both of her husbands, dying unabsolved by their priest.
The narration of The Promise flits between various points of view, switching sometimes mid-sentence – a technique with which Galgut had previously experimented in the linked novellas of In a Strange Room (2010). The narrator of The Promise embodies not only the main characters but alights on others adjacent to the plot, such as the woman preparing Rachel’s body for burial and the family lawyer (to whom “promises don’t mean a thing”), as well as ghosts, jackals, the family dog and the house itself.
This free, indirect style – a narrative technique credited to Jane Austen – lends itself to irony, which Galgut further punctuates with moralising narrative interventions. The sly asides add levity, but also implicate the reader as a co-conspirator in the family’s failings. “If Salome’s home hasn’t been mentioned before it’s because you have not asked,” we’re told. “You didn’t care to know.”
Galgut invariably draws comparisons to his compatriot, the Nobel laureate JM Coetzee, and The Promise circles around similar themes of contested property and reparations as Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning Disgrace (1999). The family saga of The Promise unfolds on the backdrop of South Africa’s shifting political landscape (from hosting the Rugby World Cup to Mbeki’s inauguration to Zuma’s resignation), serving as an allegory for the country’s failings at reconciliation.
The titular promise relates not only to Rachel’s death wish but the wasted promise of “the land of plenty”. Just as Anton’s potential is squandered, so is the prospect of a thriving South Africa. In the last chapter, a “growing throng of the wasted and depleted and maimed” crowd the streets of Cape Town. Water is rationed, “the grid is collapsing, no maintenance and no money, the President’s friends have run off with the cash”.
The Promise has a decisively Joycean Dead end, with diluvian rain washing over the veld. Galgut refuses redemption, however, by likening the storm to “some cheap redemptive symbol in a story, falling from a turbulent sky on to rich and poor, happy and unhappy alike”. Although the political situation shifts, the Swarts remain ignorant and indifferent. Salome moves from not being allowed to attend the first funeral at all to a seat in the family pew for the last one, but apart from Amor, she remains invisible to the family members nonetheless.
Even Amor’s unbridled goodness, as her name implies – she works tirelessly as a nurse on a HIV ward and signs over her inheritance to Salome – is insufficient to make amends. As the last family member standing, she can finally honour the promise to Salome, now in her 70s. But Salome’s son, with whom Amor played as a child, hisses that the gesture comes 30 years too late. The gift may even turn out to be a “poisoned chalice”: as there’s a prior historical claim to the land, despite the deeds, Salome could be evicted.
After a foray elsewhere with Arctic Summer (2014), a historical novel about the personal life of EM Forster, Galgut returns with The Promise to mine the issues of his country. He has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize twice, for The Good Doctor (2003) and In a Strange Room (2010), both of which were set in South Africa. Third time lucky?
