In The Promise, Galgut chronicles the decline of post-apartheid South Africa through four funerals over 40 years
“I’m used to not winning – that’s kind of what I’m programmed for, and what I’m braced for,” says the quietly spoken South African novelist Damon Galgut, the morning after he was awarded the Booker prize for his ninth novel, The Promise. He has been shortlisted twice before: in 2003 for The Good Doctor, and in 2010 for In a Strange Room. He finds the whole thing “deeply disquieting” (his mother has helpfully given his contact details to journalists back in South Africa). The ceremony last night felt totally unreal, he says, “as if I’d been hit over the head. Obviously it was a great night for the book, so it is hard to be displeased with that.”
Slight in person (he’s a committed yogi), the 57-year-old author is serious and courteous in conversation, but the sardonic voice of the novel’s shapeshifting, puckish narrator clearly belongs to him. Written in an innovative style, The Promise tells the story of a white South African family through the device of four funerals over 40 years, chronicling the decline of post-apartheid South Africa. It might be more JM Coetzee than Richard Curtis, but Galgut’s Four Funerals is surprisingly funny. (The family are called Swarts, which means “black” in Afrikaans, “a sort of in-joke”, as he puts it). With the exception of a recent “beating” in the London Review of Books, the novel has been rapturously received. “A surprising number of novelists are very good; few are extraordinary,” began one critic, just warming up.
