Parable of a nation

Damon Galgut’s novel reflects the slow and partial fulfillment of the promise of the country it is set in: South Africa. It is a memorable read, the kind that stays with you for weeks afterwards, the kind where a passage or event seeps back unexpectedly into your mind.

Amor Swart is twelve years old, in a South African boarding school, when her mother dies and she is brought home by her father’s sister for the funeral.

Tannie Marina talks in emotive Afrikaans the whole way, her voice low and confiding, full of dimunitives, even though her motives are not benign. It’s the usual topic, how Ma has betrayed the whole family by changing her religion. Correction, by going back to her own religion. To being a Jew!

The Swart family lives in a farmhouse outside Pretoria, with a black maid called Salome who lives in a tiny house on their property.

A stout solid woman, wearing a second-hand dress, given to her by Ma years ago. A headscarf tied over her hair. She is barefoot, and the soles of her feet are cracked and dirty. Her hands have marks on them too, the scuffs and scars of innumerable collisions. Same age as Ma supposedly, forty, though she looks much older. Not much shows in her face, she wears her life like a mask, like a graven image

The other siblings are Anton (doing his compulsory military service when the book begins) and Astrid (looking for marriage), both older than Amor. Their mother Rachel was nursed through her terminal illness by Salome, and Amor overheard her dying mother make her father promise to give Salome ownership of her little home.

The promise, unsurprisingly, is broken.

You said you would give her the house. You promised.

Her father is stunned at this news. When did I say that?

That girl isn’t getting a house, Tannie Marina says. No, no, no.

The novel is told from multiple points of view, and there are several layers of conflicts. Amor’s father Manie has a lifelong feud with his wife’s Jewish relatives, and is bitter about the Jewish funeral ceremony Rachel had requested. Anton and his father do not get along, and Anton has deserted the army after killing a black woman.

His mind has done little since except turn that moment over and over in wonderment and despair.

In the household, only Salome and Amor are truly mourning Rachel.

There are four sections to the novel, each ten years further along in time, set around a different funeral, and showing the changes in South Africa. In the second section, set in 1995, Anton returns from Johannesburg to the farm, passing the government buildings in Pretoria along the way.

Wonder if Mandela is in there right now, at his desk. From a cell to a throne, never thought I’d see in my lifetime. Weird how quickly it’s come to seem ordinary.

And the Swart family moves on too. Astrid marries and has children. Amor grows up and leaves South Africa as soon as possible,, estranges herself from her family and decides to become a nurse. Anton wanders around the farm indolent and unambitious, with plans of writing a novel that never come to fruition. Meanwhile, Salome’s life continues unchanged, year after year, and her son Lukas comes of age during the unfulfilled promises of the new South Africa. While her life does not improve, by the time of the Mbeki and Zuma presidences there are other black characters who have wealthy lifestyles.

Multiple points of view and multiple timeframes are often hard to pull off successfully, but this is a beautifully crafted novel that handles both successfully and elegantly. Each section is complete in itself, a delicate short story with deftly outlined characters and a spare, lean style of writing. (It seems quite astonishing that Galgut, Arundhati Roy and Rushdie all won the Booker, with the latter two having such dramatically different, lush, styles of writing from the former. Kudos to the Booker judges for not getting stuck in a particular rut!)

Some of the writing is from the perspective of an outside, omniscient narrator. At one point it’s the dead Rachel (‘she looks at herself on the [mortuary] table and begins to understand’), at another point the nearby jackals (‘with their elusive liquid movement, […] they do seem insubstantial’). The switch from one perspective to another in a single chapter, and sometimes in a single paragraph is seamless and fluid.

This is the second Galgut I’ve read, and like The Good Doctor, the black characters are described from the point of view of the white protagonists. The novel’s biting commentary about apartheid and race is no less powerful because he writes only from one perspective. He accomplishes this, I think, because he writes about the white Swarts without a trace of sentimentality. The reader is not necessarily expected to identify with these characters, who can be self-absorbed, grasping, petty and selfish, in a sadly familiar human way. Amor, perhaps, seems to represent the moral center of the family and country, but even she chooses (and can choose) to be detached and distant.

The Swart’s self-absorbed mental commentary can be ironic — here’s Amor returning to the farm:

The view from the taxi window is a bit amazing. […] Never did the middle of town look like this, so many black people drifting casually about, as if they belong here. It’s almost like an African city!

The ‘promise’ remains unfulfilled through most of the book, and by the time it inches toward fruition, it might also be too late. I’m avoiding spoilers here, but there is a powerful scene towards the end of the book where Salome, Amor and Salome’s son Lukas have an intense conversation about the inheritance f that little house.

Whether this book deserved the Booker, I cannot say, not having read all the other shortlisted novels (I’m working on it!). Regardless of the competition, The Promise is worth reading for its elegance, complexity, and its layered reflection of societal change.