Our May book was the Booker Prize winning novel, The promise, by the South African writer Damon Galgut. Set between 1986 and 2018, it centres on a white South African family, living on a farm outside Pretoria. The family comprises Ma, Pa, and their three children, Astrid, Anton and Amor. In the opening pages, the youngest member of the family, Amor, overhears her dying mother extract a promise from her father to give a house on the property to Salome, the Black maid, who worked for the family her whole life. The novel chronicles what happens to that promise, and in so doing provides a potted history of South African life and politics in the post-Apartheid decades.
As always, we started with our …
First impressions
Unusually for our group – though it does happen – everyone enjoyed the book, so there was much repetition in our first impressions.
Recurring impressions were that:
- the writing impressed us with its accessibility, despite tricky time transitions and voice shifts, its remarkable spareness, and its humour. Other words used to describe the writing included deft, marvellous, evocative. As one member said, it often had a lyrical, stream-of-consciousness feel.
- framing it around four funerals was a clever way of providing insight into different aspects of South Africa
- it effectively used satire and irony to convey its ideas
- the characters were fascinating, with wonderful details being used in the characterisation, making even minor characters interesting to read.
A couple found it a little confusing initially, but said they soon settled in because of the writing.
Our ex-South African member called it outstanding, and used words like sharp, clever, funny, vicious. She said it’s loaded with politics and history, and that Galgut nails the South Africa she knew and had experienced. She wondered how non-South Africans coped with the Afrikaans words, but we all felt that they were mostly accessible in the context and didn’t bother us.
We agreed that the novel was exciting to read because of the style used to tell a story that was also of great interest to all of us. We could see why it won the Booker Prize.
Further discussion
Sometimes when a book is universally liked our conversation flags, but that was not the case here. Indeed, the challenge for this report is to bring together the plethora of ideas and opinions generated during our discussion.
On the voice
A significant aspect of the writing was the unusual, outspoken voice Galgut uses, and we had various ideas about it. One member suggested that the slippery, shifting voice worked to implicate us, the reader, throughout the narrative. It did not let us distance ourselves from the thoughts, decisions and behaviours we were seeing.
Some felt the voice was treading a line between a spiritual realm and the physical world, and thought that appropriate to the work and its religious thread. Early in the novel, for example, after Ma has died, we are told:
She looks real, which is to say, ordinary. How would you know she is a ghost? Many of the living are vague and adrift too, it’s not a failing unique to the departed.
On the writing
One aspect of the writing, besides those mentioned already, is its heightened awareness of the power of words to clarify or obfuscate, as in:
So Salome has gone back to her own house instead, beg your pardon, to the Lombard place.
(Which reminds us that the promise has not been enacted.)
He no longer calls himself dominee, he’s a pastoor these days, peddling a softer line in salvation to his customers, ahem, that is to say, his flock, so that everyone benefits.
(Which tells us something about his real motivations.)
On the characters
With such a cast of strongly delineated characters, we couldn’t resist talking about them, though again the discussion roamed far and wide. One member pointed to the epigraph, in which Fellini quotes a woman asking him “Why is it that in your movies, there is not even one normal person?” What is normal we could ask?
We found the three siblings in the family well differentiated, with most of us feeling more for Amor and to a lesser degree for Anton (whom one member described as mad but charming), than for Astrid with her aspirations for a life of wealth and privilege. We noted that their family name Swart ironically means black, and is also an archaic word for “baneful, malignant”.
Desiree, Anton’s wife, was seen by some as the most difficult character to grasp, as she has few redeeming features. We loved the evocation of her efficient mother, Maman, who can take control of situations at the drop of a hat. Galgut’s description of her as “the platinum ice lolly, forty five facelifts later and those killer heels” was enjoyed.
Salome is regularly in the background, tracking the changes – or lack thereof – in the lives of many black South Africans after the end of Apartheid. While things may have changed legally, nothing much has, materially and socially speaking. She is largely ignored by Astrid and Anton – despite having been like a second mother to them – and is given no humanity by Desiree.
Favourite minor characters were mentioned, like Lexington the driver (who “brings the Triumph to the front steps”) and the homeless man (“as he keeps obsessively singing the first line to Blowin’ in the wind, let’s call him Bob”). These and many others, including funeral workers and grave-diggers, appear briefly but add depth to the picture being painted. One felt sorry for Astrid’s husbands, Dean and Jake.
On whether Amor could have done something sooner
Amor is the most empathetic character, as she demonstrates a sense of compassion. It’s telling that she becomes a woman at the novel’s beginning, and is in menopause at the end. She lives a deliberately spartan life and works as a nurse with the most needy, like AIDS patients, all of which suggests she is serving a self-imposed penance. Whatever the reason, her life seems stunted. The question to ask though is whether she could have done something sooner than she does.
We discussed what she might have done, given her powerlessness as the youngest and a woman. We are told that she’d been injured by a lightning strike as a child, which, the narrator says, is why “she’s always been a slow child”. The narrator also makes clear at the beginning, when her mother dies, that “History has not yet trod on her … she doesn’t know what country she is living in”. We felt that most of us at that age didn’t know, in a real sense, what countries we were living in. She has a complicated relationship with brother Anton. They seem to be sympatico in some ways but he always lets her down. Our narrator reminds Amor, near the end that “he mostly spoke past her”.
On the other hand, she seems to give up easily, leaving the family as soon as she can after each visit and often before proceedings (such as funerals) have concluded. She doesn’t tell people where she is – except Salome always knows. But no-one thinks to ask her!
In the end, we felt that Amor should be given the benefit of the doubt, and wondered whether the message was that even with heart, an Amor is not enough.
On the “promise” motif
This is ultimately a political novel as much as a personal one, so Galgut deftly plays with the idea of “promise” in more ways than one, but we all agreed that the novel opens and closes with a false promise. It teases with the idea that the end of Apartheid brought the promise of a new South Africa, but that’s not how it has played out (in the novel or in reality). This failure to live up to its promise is paralleled in the character of Anton, who at the beginning of the novel is “full of promise”, as he describes in his unfinished autobiographical novel, but by the end it’s clear that he has not lived up to that:
He’s still stunned by the simple realisation that’s just struck. It’s true, I’ve wasted my life. Fifty years old, half a century, and he’s never going to do any of the things he was once certain he would do … Not ever going to do much of anything.
There are many unfulfilled promises throughout the novel, including the promise in the first part not to send young Amor away again after her mother’s death.
On religion
Four religions/belief systems frame the book – Jewish, Dutch Reform, Catholic and, Eastern/alternative. They don’t come out wonderfully well as true sources of support for people. There are also references to ghosts and, as our homeless man Bob, sees them, “other entities”, which intrigued us.
Our conclusion
Overall, we thought that a main theme of the novel is that one group/culture having an unhealthy position of power over another destroys both cultures. We liked, however, that the novel is not didactic, and never tells us what to think. It presents the characters, with their actions and decisions, and leaves us to consider what it means.
It also leaves us, near the end, with this idea:
No truthful answers without cold questions. And no knowledge without truth.
Overall it was an enthusiastic discussion that raised a lot of questions, and answered few – but that, we all agreed, is the nature of the book.
Related works to check out
- Mark Solms on Conversations (presented by Sarah Kanowski) re giving land back in South Africa
- Novels and short stories by Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee
In a rare departure from form – but who says we are not flexible! – we met in the afternoon, instead of the evening, to enable members to attend that evening’s fundraising concert for the Ukraine. It was an unusually cold day for May, but coffee (or tea) and delicious cake soon warmed us up. It was good practice, we agreed, for the future when, if our enthusiasm for night-driving starts to wane, we may need to think about daytime meetings.
Present: 11 members
Minerva Reads ACT 