The Promise, about a toxic family in a toxic society, feels like the book this author was born to write
This year an idiosyncratic shortlist has produced a clear and unsurprising winner. With an impressive backlist and two former shortlistings, Damon Galgut is a major figure in world literature and a vital, nuanced chronicler of the deep hurts of South Africa, past and present.
The Promise feels like the book Galgut was born to write. Opening in 1986 during apartheid, it focuses on wealthy Afrikaners, the ironically named Swarts (Afrikaans for “black”), a toxic family in a toxic society. The novel is divided into four sections, each built around an untimely and usually violent death. In the first section, a deathbed promise is made to give a house on the Swart farm to the black servant, Salome. As Nelson Mandela moves “from a cell to a throne” and society is transformed over the following decades, the promise goes unfulfilled; the family is tested by history, but they fail on every count. The youngest daughter Amor, 13 when the book opens and with “no idea what country she’s living in”, is the family’s conscience, but for most of the novel absents herself from her awful relatives. In her final meeting with Salome’s son, he resists her hopes of redemption and forgiveness – of a happy ending. “Everything you have, white lady, is already mine. I don’t have to ask.”
