Damon Galgut’s novel The Promise won this year’s Booker Prize, beating a tough field that included Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro (whose Klara and the Sun made the longlist); Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Powers; and the delightful No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood. It’s a fine novel, but I think without more knowledge of the recent history of South Africa, I didn’t get the full gist of the work.
The novel focuses on a white family in South Africa, the Swarts, whose matriarch dies as the novel opens. She made her husband promise her that he’d leave the family home to the Black woman, Salome, who helped raise their children and take care of the home, but he later denies this – except that Amor, their youngest child, heard it. She refuses to forget what she heard (or says she heard, as Galgut only gives us her assertions), even as it causes a break between her and her siblings, Anton and Astrid. The four chapters in the novel each revolve around the deaths of one of the family members, leaving only Amor in the end to reckon with the family’s legacy.
Galgut sets The Promise againsta backdrop of societal upheaval in South Africa, including the end of apartheid, the tenure of HIV/AIDS denialist Thabo Mbeki as Prime Minister, and his corrupt successor Jacob Zuma, who was in the news again this month when a judge ordered him to return to prison. Each of the Swarts family members dies in a way that could serve as a metaphor for one of those larger changes – one dies as a result of religious mania, a clinging to old and outdated ways; one dies in a carjacking, of which there are over 10,000 a year in South Africa. Without knowing a lot more about the recent history of South Africa, however, I can only guess at any deeper meanings here.
Lacking that context, the novel doesn’t have as much to offer the reader as the accolades imply. Amor is the only remotely interesting or sympathetic character in the book. The father, Manie, is two different messes in two different chapters. Astrid is shrill, materialistic, and selfish. Anton could have been a deeper character in his own novel, but he’s off the page enough in The Promise that we only see the surface, never getting at, say, why he deserted from the military, or what he did in the intervening years before he returns for the next funeral. Galgut keeps all of his characters, even Amor, at arm’s length, giving the whole text a feeling of emotional reserve and thus preventing the readers from getting to know any of the characters enough to connect with them. I’m only assuming that Amor is supposed to be the central character, or most central one; she is the moral compass, refusing to budge from her recollection of the promise or belief that the remaining family members should fulfill it, even when it leads to a rupture between her and her siblings. Her life away from the farmstead would appear to be more interesting, or at least a way to further develop her character, but instead she comes across as cold and remote even when she has the strongest feelings of any character in the book.
The Booker Prize has always felt more enigmatic than the Pulitzer Prize, even though they are often seen as analogues to each other; it’s easier to understand why a book wins the Pulitzer than why one wins the Booker, at least in more recent times. (I won’t even get started on the early Pulitzer committees’ apparent love for wildly racist novels.) In the case of The Promise, I’m assuming I just missed what they saw in the novel. If it won because it serves as an allegory for the last forty years of South African history, I plead ignorance. As a narrative, however, it was merely good – an interesting premise, with solid execution and a strong conclusion, but lacking the well-defined characters that might have elevated this novel to something greater, and something that I would associate with the sort of plaudits The Promise has otherwise received. For whatever it’s worth, I would have voted for No One Is Talking About This instead.
Next up: I’m between books but just finished Harold Evans’ Do I Make Myself Clear?, a wonderful book of advice for writers and editors by the former editor-in-chief of the Sunday Times and founder of Condé Nast Traveler. Evans died last September at 92.