The Promise

By Damon Galgut

Chatto & Windus, £16.99

In 1986, on a farm near Pretoria, Rachel Swarts lies dying of cancer; on her deathbed, she elicits a commitment from her husband, Manie, to give their housemaid Salome full ownership of the house she lives in within the estate. It is an odd requirement since, under apartheid, Salome is debarred from owning property.

Even so, Manie’s promise is witnessed by the youngest member of the family, Amor, and, over the following decades, her insistence on its force weighs on her relationships with her father and her siblings.

Like much of his previous work, Damon Galgut’s excellent new, Booker longlisted novel lends itself to interpretation as an allegory of recent South African history. What happens to the promise reflects many of the country’s wider hopes and disappointments. While the novel cannot be reduced to a simple message, the political context is inescapable. Key moments are linked with, for instance, the Springboks’ talismanic victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup and Thabo Mbeki’s presidential inauguration in 1999.

Notwithstanding its allegorical content, The Promise is a powerful novel of character.

Each member of the Swarts family undertakes a spiritual journey. Rachel, for example, following Manie’s conversion to evangelical Christianity, returns to Judaism. Her motivation for this change and its impact on others resonate through the book. Galgut’s descriptions of Jewish observance are impressively detailed, and Judaism comes off well compared with other religious and spiritual traditions that feature in the novel. Christianity fares badly: Manie’s Evangelical minister is a figure of extreme venality, while a judgmental and feckless Roman Catholic priest proves destructive to his congregants.

New Age spirituality does better. Although he has a certain shiftiness about him, Mito, a yoga instructor with a philosophical bent, becomes surprisingly sympathetic. His repeated maxim, “matter is spirit in fall from grace”, aligns with the novel’s metaphysical outlook.

The Promise is manifestly an ambitious novel but, remarkably, Galgut rarely needs to strain for impact.

His concise prose style as well as his unsentimental take on the question of violence in South African society might invite comparison with the writing of J. M. Coetzee, but his ability deftly to shift perspective from one character to the next creates a distinctive polyphonic effect.

Admittedly, one set of perspectives that seems muted is that of the non-white characters. Only towards the end of the story do we learn what Salome and her son Lukas make of the Swarts’s actions. It is clearly an authorial decision to focus on the flawed agency of white South Africans (ironically, the Swarts family’s surname derives from the Afrikaans for “black”). Amor acknowledges the one-sidedness of the promise, but still maintains its fulfilment is “not nothing”.

Readers must decide for themselves whether her assertion carries conviction.

Alun David is a freelance reviewer