Like a long-dormant veld seed, Damon Galgut bloomed suddenly into international literary fame with The Good Doctor, a short, grim novel set in his native South Africa and promptly listed for the 2003 Booker Prize. Although this was his fifth book (he wrote the first at 17), he was hailed as a novelty and a prodigy. Galgut told a Guardian interviewer at the time, “I’ve never seen such a level of attention. It’s staggering. It’s really a treat. In South Africa, books and writing don’t really feature on the radar. There’s not a lot of value placed on culture — as opposed to sport.”
Galgut is still hardly a household name in the US, even though he has published four more novels to critical acclaim. With his most recent, The Promise, having won the prestigious Booker, one hopes that readers here will look up, buy or borrow, read, discuss and compare. Compare with what, then? Certainly the über-famous icons of white South African fiction, Peter Carey, Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee (who won the Booker twice). Coetzee in particular is sometimes considered Galgut’s older sibling, if not model, in that both writers explicitly take on the original sin of their native country, apartheid — in Galgut’s case, with a forensic focus on its unredeemed festering aftermath. Disgrace, or In the Heart of the Country, two Coetzee titles, would have fit Galgut’s novel as well. Politics is often destiny for writers as well as their creations.
The reader would do well to bring a glancing awareness of South African history to The Promise which, at only 269 pages, steams through 40-odd years of upheaval with extraordinary density and almost febrile velocity. From the Emergencies of the ’80s to Jacob Zuma’s resignation in 2018, race is a fraught topic these middle-class characters prefer to avoid. But injustice, fear and violence are the very air they breathe.
Geographically speaking, we begin and mostly stay on an unprepossessing sprawling farm somewhere outside of Pretoria. In the first of of the novel’s four sections, titled “Ma,” we meet the Swart family just as the disposition of Ma’s body (“The horrible meaty fact of it”), not yet cold on her deathbed, is being bitterly contested between birth family and in-laws. Rachel Swart re-converted to Judaism six months before her passing, a decision Pa suffered as another bombshell in their complex marital trench warfare. Once she’s gone, he sorrows in anger. “Her absence is like a steely coldness deep inside. She knew how to get to the innermost part of me, sticking her little knives in there. Couldn’t tell the difference between hate and love …” But Rachel’s written directive is clear; she will be buried in the Jewish cemetery, accorded Jewish rites. Her other urgent dying wish, voiced only to her husband, was that the rough little house where her servant and lifelong companion Salome lives be deeded to its inhabitant. Pa solemnly makes the titular promise, arguably under duress, and with no idea that there might be an unseen witness to his word.
In this first section, as in all the novel to come, there’s plenty of hate circulating and damn little love. Hate with its ugly relations: envy, resentment, mistrust, and greed. (“Pa” Swart’s source of comfortable income isn’t the infertile farm; it’s the delightfully named “Scaly City,” a popular and profitable reptile park.) The main actual relatives we meet are aunt Tannie Marina, righteously cruel, her boozy useless husband Ockie, and the three Swart offspring: Anton, Astrid and 13-year old Amor, who is considered a bit “odd” after a lightning strike nearly killed her and made off with her baby toe. It’s grief-felled Amor’s thoughts and impressions that guide us into this classically unhappy family. She represents throughout the closest thing to a true North, among all the self-centered, false compasses. That said, after the funeral Amor essentially disappears, both from the farm and the narrative, which leaps along at roughly ten year intervals to parts titled “Pa,” “Astrid,” and “Anton.” Only toward the very end does Amor return to complete the narrative arc — a closure long anticipated by the reader, and therefore all the more engrossing. In the very last scene, the author steps from the fictional shadows to underscore what we’ve long since known. “There she sits, at the center of her story.” Amor in her mid-40s, who has been present yet absent throughout. An enigma wrapped in a conundrum. Not least to herself.
Galgut is deft at bringing the reader into his writerly confidence, pace the above quote. He likes to hesitate aloud between options. This device (the term means no disrespect) has the paradoxical effect of strengthening the viability of the fiction. In a scenelet featuring a homeless man we hear “… let’s call him Bob. Who knows that might even be his name.” And then, “Why is he obscuring our view, demanding sympathy, using a name that doesn’t belong to him, demanding our sympathy with his stories?”
Galgut also flouts the pious creative writing 101 conventions about narrative point-of-view. A Promise is enriched and made curious and fresh by the way we are shipped without warning from the mind of one character to the next, sometimes on a page, sometimes within a paragraph. (Virginia Woolf took a similar tack almost a hundred years ago, notably in The Waves.) That such POV switching is not confusing is a testament to Galgut’s skill. The same goes for his dispensing with quotation marks, as many European writers do –– this succeeds only when the cadence, idiom, and context of the words clearly demarcate speech from narrative. It’s all in the ear, not the curlicues on the page. I’m less impressed by his insistence on presenting all forms of bodily emissions, from menstruation to pissing to bulimic barfing to defecation –– the last, he declares, to break a taboo. (In fact others have fictionalized Nr 2 before him. Heinrich Böll comes to mind.)
But let us return to style and cadence. Galgut’s voice is neither flashy nor insistent, and yet so sure and individual that when starting this review I heard his style in my own sentences. Here’s a random taste: “The bird lies in its little grave (…) for only a few hours before it’s dug up by a jackal, one of a pair that has taken up residence near the koppje … The dove is a gift, the reek of its blood coming up through the soil, only one wing tip stained with human scent. The two jackals tear it apart with high gibbering cries until Astrid can’t bear it any longer and throws open a window and screams at them to stop.” Or this, as Anton picks up the phone: “Hello, he says, What’s wrong?, just as a cloud covers the sun, and in the shadow that follows he has an intuition, like a funnel down which he can see a bright, tiny picture of the future. One of those moments, hard to explain, when time seems to move in the wrong direction.” Anton is about to learn of his father’s bizarre, horrible and, from a certain perspective, hilariously stupid and appropriate death.
It’s hard to decide what is fair to reveal or not reveal about this novel, which like all self-respecting literary fiction these days sidesteps plot as if it were a venomous snake. Instead there are Shakespeare-textured themes such as prodigal son, corrosive power and impotent regret, but all without any positive balancing heat, or even everyday warmth. Mostly The Promise tugs the reader in, and mostly keeps her there, thanks to its assured structure, sarcastic wit, simmering anger and telling detail: rooms, for example, that hold all their inhabitants’ ghost-prints in a palimpsest of the living and dead.
Galgut’s a remorseless social observer. He skewers every one of his characters, Amor and Salome notably excepted. The men are venial, repulsive bumblers, the women frigid or sluttish or both, in any case shot straight from hell. Tannie Marina at Pa’s death: “… she is hungry for drama and gossip and cheap spectacle. Bloodshed and treachery on the tv is one thing, but here real life has served up an actual, thrilling opportunity.” Astrid the moral contortionist has been getting it on with her second husband’s partner, “… the politician who now more than ever shall remain nameless. But so what again, that’s how the system works, favors for favors, and life is going very well for Jake … Really, her husband ought to be grateful she’s having the affair.” And Anton’s wife, who lobbies for firing old Salome? “Desiree doesn’t blame herself for much, she never has. The world is there to try to please her, and she is there to feel disappointed by it.” Even the local pastor’s housekeeper comes in for it. The author’s blistering tongue, like those of his women, is hilarious at times. But by Part 3, “Astrid,” I found the misogyny and misanthropy wearing thin. Anton once promised to be another exception — sensitive, smart, handsome — but a ghastly youthful mistake soon curdles his soul like cream left out under the blazing African sun. His fate feels overly harsh, a punishment not by conscience or God, but by Galgut. Established religions and their hypocritical human sales reps are unflinchingly shredded as well.
The simmering anger is rooted of course in history, in the original sin of apartheid and the cluster-bombs of corruption and continued poverty, violence and racism that followed Nelson Mandela’s brief shining hour. It won’t be lost on the reader that Pa saw Amor’s lightning strike as God pointing at her, while she saw the family barbecue, which turns her permanently vegetarian, as a ritual sacrifice. Her adult life, the little we learn of it, could be viewed as sacrifice incarnate. And what of the other enigma at the heart of the novel, Salome, about whose life we learn essentially nothing, though she is often glimpsed going about her often demeaning tasks? She just came with the land, Pa says. Time to get rid of her, Astrid muses. Similarly, here’s young Anton being driven home from the Army by the family’s Black chauffeur: “Unknowable lives. Lexington himself is a hieroglyph, in his chauffeur’s cap and jacket. He has to wear them, Pa says, so that the police can see he’s not a skelm, he’s my driver.”
Not to go too deeply into the question of whether writers are still allowed to exercise imagination and empathy, but would it have been “cultural appropriation” for The Promise to render its Black characters’ lives as real as it does the Swarts’? (The name means ‘black’ in Afrikaans. You may have noticed that Galgut is not too suble about names.) Would slipping into another skin color have been impossible, or have punctured some parable of the Unknowable, Unbridgeable, that The Promise sets out to narrate? Christian symbols abound, after all, along with hints of the supernatural. Ma’s lingering presence, for example, around the old farm. Amor, in her purity, capable not of passion but of the cool impartial love that is charity — Amor was always especially sensitive to spiritual intimations. Alas, her childhood certainty that “A Christian never goes back on his word” proves far, far from true.
[Published by Europa Editions on March 15, 2022, 272 pages, $25.00/$17.95 hardcover/softcover]