The Promise by Damon Galgut

 

Damon Galgut in his book 'The Promise' 51st of 2021, examines the disintegration of the dysfunctional privileged white Swart family in South Africa, living on a farm outside Pretoria, over a period of over 3 decades. 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 other voices, we sounds the same and we tell the same stories, in an accent squashed underfoot, all the consonants decapitated and the vowels stove in.

It is effectively a family tale – the Swarts, a white and relatively privileged South African nuclear family of five who live on a farm near Pretoria. Their story and the story of those around them.

The family is

Amor - owner of the farm and later the main family business – a reptile park, over time he grows close to an ex Reformed Church Afrikaans minister

His wife Rachel - who re-converts back to Judaism while she is dying of cancer

And their three children:

Anton - whose unplanned birth out of wedlock lead to a marriage Amor’s family considered a mistake – Anton kills a woman when conscripted to the South African Army and deserts before later marrying his childhood sweetheart Desiree who becomes increasingly involved with New Age and Yoga Practices and the leader of a nearby Ashram

Astrid - who converts to Catholicism, has twins and two unhappy marriages

Amor – something of the irreligious conscience of the family, spending her time nursing AIDS patients, refusing to take the family money or to stay in contact, and the only one who holds to the eponymous promise the dying Rachel extracted from Amor – to give the family’s black maid Salome the deeds to her home in the farmlands

There are two very distinctive parts of the book’s execution:

The first is its cyclical structure. The story (which ranges over several decades) is told at discrete intervals in four sections all based around the funeral of a family member (the sections named after the family member that dies in turn as the nuclear group diminishes - less “Ten Green Bottles” than “Four White Racists”). Each section starts with the circumstances of the death (cancer, snake bite, murder and suicide). Each funeral coincides with an important point of South African history (the rugby world cup victory, Mbeki’s inauguration, Zuma’s resignation). Each has details on the dead body and the viewpoint of the person preparing it for burial. Each features in detail the thoughts of the person carrying out the funeral (and the way their views clash largely with the beliefs of the remaining family members) and each has Amor’s latest attempt to realise the promise.

The second is the narrative voice – a very deliberate and intrusive omniscient narrator which swoops from character to character (including some side characters such as a down and out and a criminal and even at one stage some jackals), switches out of its default third person into first person even second person for the point of view character, sometimes addressing the reader directly and sometimes into a brief first person plural chorus.

It isn't much, she says. I know that. Three rooms and a broken roof. On a tough piece of land. Yes. But for the first time, it'll belong to your mother. Her name on the title deed. Not my family's. That isn't nothing. Yes, Salome agrees, speaking Setswana. It isn't nothing.

It is nothing, Lukas says. Smiling again, in that cold, furious way. It's what you don't need any more, it's what you don't mind throwing away. Your leftovers. That's what you're giving my mother, thirty years too late. As good as nothing.

Forster's classic book about who will inherit a house serves as the structure for Galgut's new novel “The Promise”, but it's set in South Africa in the years immediately before and after Apartheid. It follows the experiences of a relatively-privileged white family who own a small farm and their fates over time. An annexe to their property is inhabited by Salome, a black maid who has worked for the family for many years and the novel begins with matriarch Rachel on her deathbed requesting that the deed to this property be given this woman who has served her so faithfully. Although her husband Manie promises to fulfil her wish, the transfer of ownership to Salome is delayed year after year after year. The self-consumed and selfish family members are so concerned with their own dramas that fulfilling this bequest always seems tediously inconvenient or perhaps it's a power they are unwilling to relinquish. But youngest daughter Amor witnessed the promise being made and persistently reminds her family it should be honoured (much to their exasperation.) Just as Forster's novel symbolically asked who will inherit England, Galgut's story asks who will inherit South Africa but I think his query is much more complicated than that simple concept sounds.

The striking thing about how this novel is written is its impressively fluid style which artfully weaves in and out of certain perspectives, briskly navigates through different scenes and frequently switches point of view. At first this felt almost disorientating to me as transitions in focus are made so rapidly it sometimes requires careful attention to follow the narrative, but it soon became mesmerising as I felt caught in the flow of time and Galgut's gorgeously poetic language. However, the apparent freedom of this narrative to roam wherever it wishes (even into the perspective of the dead) is deceptive. As the story progresses, it becomes apparent that in following the fates of different members of the Swart family we're also tragically locked into the white gaze from which they cannot escape. Their prejudiced views saturate the sensibility of this novel. Their assumed superiority and odious casual racism appears with wincing regularity.