The Promise by Damon Galgut

The Promise
by Damon Galgut
Europa Editions, 2021

Last month the South African writer Damon Galgut won the British Booker Prize for The Promise, a novel set in South Africa. The book was published in the United States in the Spring and received little attention, but American readers may well have a particular interest in The Promise.

Very late in the novel, Galgut quotes “tomorrow and tomorrow,” the words in Macbeth that precede life “is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.” Those who have read Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury will already have noticed the parallels between Faulkner’s novel about a decaying white family in the American South early in the twentieth century and Galgut’s story about a dying Afrikaner family in South Africa during the last forty years.

Galgut’s ironically named Swart family are, like Faulkner’s Compsons, desperate to keep their generations-held property (a farm outside Pretoria) and the sense of power that ownership gives them. But the old guard’s contemporary inheritors are a cynical and self-destructive son named Anton, a composite of Faulkner’s Jason and Quentin Compson; a promiscuous and self-indulgent daughter Astrid (Galgut’s Caddy); and—not an “idiot” like Benjy but another daughter, Amor, who was struck by lightning as a child and has always seemed a bit slow and possibly brain damaged to her family. The Swarts also have employed for decades a Black housekeeper Salome who, as Faulkner’s Dilsey says, has “seed de first en de last” of the white family in this tale of tragic and sometimes comic disintegration in a time of national racial integration.

Salome is the mainspring of the plot and the reason for Galgut’s title. Just before the mother of the three Swart children dies in 1986, she makes her husband promise to give Salome a small house, a shack really, on the Swart estate. Though only thirteen, Amor reminds her family of that overheard promise, but she is ignored at her mother’s funeral. As if this denial were a curse upon the Swarts, Galgut organizes the book around three other Swart funerals—and three more denials--over the next four decades. Only Amor survives to keep the promise and suspense alive.

What saves The Promise from earnest, grave-digging melodrama and post-apartheid political correctness is Galgut’s combining the tragic downfall of The Sound and the Fury with the antic comedy of As I Lay Dying, where another dysfunctional family has very different motives before and after the burial of the mother. Most of the Swarts are not just racist and entitled. They can also be as ridiculous as Faulkner’s country-folk Bundrens. Pa Swart is killed when he attempts to set a record for time in a glass cage with a cobra, perhaps too explicit a symbol for white sin in what was once an African Eden. Anton is both as foolishly furious as Jason Compson and as obsessively self-pitying as suicidal Quentin. Astrid sheds husbands and lovers, acquires goods, and ends up with a swami partner who educates her in, she likes to believe, “Higher Things.” Only Amor, who leaves the estate as a young woman and becomes a nurse, avoids being comic.

Except for Salome and her family, Blacks are kept out of the Swarts’ double-fenced estate and are seen mostly on television news, historical background for, presumably, Galgut’s non-South African readers. Mandela’s ascendance and Mbeki’s inauguration are recorded. Outside the estate, though, the Swarts do have racial contacts. As a young army recruit, Anton shoots and kills a demonstrating Black woman. Near the end, as if to balance accounts, a Swart is shot and killed by a Black man. At the very end, Salome’s son has something like the last word, ranting against “the promise” so long unfulfilled.

Galgut’s characterization of the individual Swarts could have been heavy-handed had he not turbo-charged the constantly and quickly shifting narration of As I Lay Dying to create an immersive style that might be called Group Gossip. The characters talk to themselves about inappropriate trivial matters—at the many funerals, for example--and often babble to others with little reference to context—like Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, who are mentioned in the novel. But Galgut allows no character to go on for very long. There might be two or three shifts of speakers on a single page, and point of view may suddenly change from third to first person and back. The effect is often as if the characters are all talking at once, a chaotic chorus of similar embarrassing revelations, absurd judgments, petty grievances, and silly self-perceptions.

Galgut demonstrates and explains his quite original and very congenial technique in the following passage, which occurs during a Swart funeral:

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 the other voices, we sound the same and we tell the same stories, in an accent squashed underfoot, all the consonants decapitated and the vowels stove in. Something rusted and rain-stained and dented in the soul, and it comes through in the voice.

The passage first offers a third-person generalization about the family, pauses with an oral interpolation, shifts to chummy second-person address, and then changes to first-person plural before ending with what seems to be an authorial overview and summary of the culture.

The Promise has been compared to Coetzee’s Disgrace, another novel about a South African land dispute involving family and race, but Galgut’s touch is lighter and reaches further because he gives everyone (even non-Swarts) a chance to have their say—from a crematorium employee and a scheming priest to ashes in a funeral urn and to a couple of vultures who discuss an improperly buried dove. In The Promise, the range of disgrace is almost total but somehow ameliorated by being at unexpected times laughable.

Of this year’s six Booker finalists, I have read three besides The Promise and on the basis of this partial sample believe Galgut’s novel is probably a wise choice. Only one of the finalist authors is British, which renewed the argument to exclude, as in the recent past, Americans (three finalists this year) and other non-Commonwealth writers. But a novel such as The Promise--which uses a single family as a microcosm and perhaps even as an allegory—has long legs, can illuminate racial issues both in and beyond the English-speaking world. With his swart [sic] comedy and gossipy style, Galgut sneaks under taboos and around fixed ideas. Looking at his once virago aunt, Anton quotes Heart of Darkness—“the horror, the horror”—but Galgut’s summation of The Promise would be, I think, “the stupidity, the stupidity” of a minority white tribe attempting to hold on to booty they seized long ago.

—Tom LeClair's fifth and final "Passing" novel--Passing Again--will be published in March.