The promise
Damon Galgut
Cape Town: Umuzi, 2021
ISBN: 9781415210581
243 pages
Arguably what distinguishes the brilliant writer from the indifferently good one is whether or not he or she is able to manipulate the chosen form, leaving it more resourceful, and pliable, for those who come after. On these terms, Damon Galgut is decidedly a brilliant writer. The promise is a major achievement, fully deserving its place on the Man Booker Prize longlist.
In an interview with Mark Gevisser in the Johannesburg Review of Books, Galgut says, “Most of the stories have been told by now, it’s just the ways of telling that are new.” It’s an exaggeration, of course, but the comment expresses a truth about The promise in relation to its forebears in South African fiction. For in telling the story of the ironically named Swart family, Galgut is revisiting terrain that has been mapped many times before – from Karel Schoeman (Na die geliefde land) to Nadine Gordimer (July’s people) to Marlene van Niekerk (Agaat) – namely, the decline of the white South African family, buffeted by history and undermined from within.
None of these eminent forerunners, however, has quite the black-comedic quality that Galgut brings to his story (another implication of Swart, possibly), implying that the subject has lost some of the gravitas it once had, at least for Galgut.
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The promise is primarily a family history in four funerals, loosely latticed to a history of South Africa over four decades – from the state of emergency in the mid-1980s, to the triumphalism of the mid-’90s (when we won the rugby world cup), to the fissuring of the nonracial dream under Mbeki, to the abjection of the Zuma years, when the “promise” has soured, not least for most black citizens.
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The promise is primarily a family history in four funerals, loosely latticed to a history of South Africa over four decades – from the state of emergency in the mid-1980s, to the triumphalism of the mid-’90s (when we won the rugby world cup), to the fissuring of the nonracial dream under Mbeki, to the abjection of the Zuma years, when the “promise” has soured, not least for most black citizens.
In each period, the Swarts lose a family member, starting with the mother, Rachel, who dies of cancer, but not before she has decided to abandon the family’s flaky Pentecostalism and return to her Jewish roots (which means a Jewish funeral, a struggle for Pa and the rest of the family). Pa himself dies of snakebite while performing a stunt at his snake park, unprotected by the new religion, followed by the elder sister, Astrid, who is murdered in a hijacking. The final death is Anton’s, who shoots a woman protestor while on active service as a conscript, then turns conscientious objector, and later takes his own life with the family shotgun, having failed at all of his projects, including that of becoming a novelist.
The survivor, and central character, is the poignantly named – and estranged – Amor, who is marked by her upbringing and family history – graphically so, having been struck by lightning as a child, which burned the soles of her feet and severed a little toe. Amor forges on to the end, overcoming the compromised lives and deaths of her parents and siblings, living a diminished life in a lonely Durban flat, far away from the family roots in Pretoria, but as a nurse, healing others.
If there is any redemption, it is in Amor, who keeps alive the promise made by Rachel before she dies, that a house in a neglected corner of the Swarts’ farm (Galgut puts the tropes of the farm novel way back in the past) should be given to Salome, the maid who serves the family for 30 years. It is called the Lombard house, after old Mrs Lombard, who used to live there in the time of a grandfather, and Salome is allowed to live in it only to prevent an Indian family from taking it over.
The Swarts prevaricate on the promise made to Salome, unable to take seriously Amor’s insistence that she heard it being uttered, and unable to keep the promise even when they do believe it was made. It comes down to Amor to do the right thing after Anton’s death, before she abandons the family home forever.
The four-part structure of four funerals across the four decades sounds schematic, but it is entirely plausible in Galgut’s hands. Similarly, Amor’s gift to Salome might sound allegorical (an allegory, that is, of the challenge facing whites to share some of their wealth for the common good), but it is, in reality, the gift of an old, broken-down afslanertjie of a house, which feels right for what has become of the new South Africa.
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Galgut’s subject is familiar, albeit with some new twists, but he is right to put the emphasis on the telling of the story, rather than on the story itself, for the real triumph of The promise lies in the narration.
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Galgut’s subject is familiar, albeit with some new twists, but he is right to put the emphasis on the telling of the story, rather than on the story itself, for the real triumph of The promise lies in the narration. Essentially, what Galgut does is rewrite the rules of third-person narration, not by abandoning the position of omniscience, but indeed by elevating it. He creates a hyper-omniscience that knows no bounds, entering the life not only of the characters, but also of the whole messed-up world of the novel, including its ghosts. Crucially, he does so in the idiom of the characters. The intimacy this creates of the narration with its subject, or subjects, is startling, so much so that until we settle into it, we would be forgiven for thinking that the identity of the narrator will emerge sooner or later as one of the family, a secret sharer of its senescence.
At times, Galgut’s writing simply soars, as in these sentences where the rabbi at Rachel’s funeral speaks with a religiosity that doesn’t touch the Swarts, certainly not the 11-year-old Amor, creating a world where there is no consolation for anyone except, possibly, the writer:
See the words fly, through the window, through the door of the room, down the passage, out of the window. Watch them rise over the city and wing their way in a little psalm-shaped flock to the farm, in search of the woman to whom they are chanted. They circle the koppie and dive down to the lawn, they enter the house through the back door and pass on stilted legs through the kitchen, like a change in the light. (49)
In several interviews, Galgut speaks of the influences that have pushed him in this direction. Having begun with a more conventional third-person narrative, he suspended the project to work on a film script, rewriting drafts that alerted him to the fluidity of the camera. When he returned to the novel, he rewrote it, importing the filmic perspectives. One is reminded of JM Coetzee speaking of the influence of the art cinema of the 1960s, using experimental techniques like stills with voice-over commentary, the result being the startling intensity and economy of In the heart of the country, which is written as a series of numbered paragraphs. While Coetzee left out the pedestrian scene-setting of the realist novel, the influence of film on The promise lies in the virtuosity with which Galgut handles point of view.
The other influence, perhaps unsurprisingly, is Galgut’s discovery (late, by his admission) of Virginia Woolf, whose modernist narration famously emerges from within the consciousness of multiple characters. It was Woolf who said that life can’t be illuminated like a series of carriage lamps in a row; it is, rather, “a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end”. The restless, shifting point of view of her fiction tries to capture this evanescence.
Galgut would no doubt agree, but so much of what he brings to the undertaking is his own, especially a penchant for withering humour, and a visceral, psychosexual energy and acuity that insists that this drama is human first, and national-historical second. Consider the middle-aged Amor, for example, in the closing paragraphs, climbing onto the roof of the farmhouse to scatter Anton’s ashes, where they make a brown streak across the tiles. As a child, she had missed the key part of Rachel’s funeral because her periods chose that moment to start and she had to flee the chapel and head for the supermarket. Now, she is having hot flushes, so she removes her shirt, a madwoman in her bra on the roof, holding an empty urn.
You’re drying slowly in your channels, running out of sap. You’re a branch that’s losing its leaves and one day you’ll break off. Then what? Then nothing. Other branches will fill the space. Other stories will write themselves over yours, scratching out every word. Even these.
Even these final, self-cancelling sentences of The promise, that is. It is a book whose wit, honesty and brilliance will ensure that it has a prominent place in South African fiction, regardless of what happens on 3 November when the Man Booker Prize winner is announced.
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