"The Promise" by Damon Galgut

 

A South African family disintegrates in Damon Galgut’s The Promise, and this disintegration occurs concurrently with the collapse of Apartheid. This family never functions well: each of the three siblings grow up with their own particular debilitating neurosis, and collectively they learn how not to love, keep promises, or reach their potential. The ‘promise’ of the title represents a bequest to a Black character in the novel, but on the wider scale it’s the promise South African society makes to its Black citizens. But it inevitably comes to nothing, or less than nothing: a bungled—nay, wrong—attempt to make reparation for decades of hatred and degradation.

The Promise contains multifarious riches for the reader: the theme of the grudging and at times malicious shift away from state-run racial persecution; the emblematic deterioration and eventual eradication of the family at the heart of the novel; the conflicted and ineffective care offered by priests at critical life moments; the addled self-absorption of nearly everyone. The youngest of the three, however, survives to nearly forty, her siblings both dead from unnatural causes, and she at length keeps the promise made to the family’s long-suffering Black maid, now in her 70s. But keeping the promise might actually plunge the poor elderly woman into yet deeper difficulty.

Galgut takes economy of language further than I have seen before. A thought in one scene immediately becomes the bulwark of the next, in so few words, it’s striking. I didn’t think it was something that he could sustain, but it gains momentum and becomes normal as the book goes on. I didn’t find it jarring, but it was new to me. I have not read his other work to see if he uses it there; it’s a worthy project, and I do have In a Strange Room in my possession.

This book won the 2021 Booker Prize and I begin as I review it to get over my mild surprise at that. It’s extremely proficient work, it deals with weighty eternal problems, its characters achieve their proper actualization throughout, and psychologically, these stories are spot-on. Fairly certainly this will become required reading, as are all Booker winners, really, but I felt less of the normal thrill I get when finishing a fine novel. It could be the pessimistic tone and message, but that wouldn’t normally affect me that way. Put it down to an off-moment for your reviewer. I do recommend it; it should definitely be part of you and your consciousness.