Is the Booker calling for the South African great? was the headline over The Irish Times's review back in July of The Promise by Damon Galgut. Four months to the day later, the answer, we can confirm, is yes.
Having written his first novel aged 17, and having twice been shortlisted for the Booker (for The Good Doctor in 2003 and In a Strange Room in 2010), the author, now 57, has lived up to his own early promise. He follows fellow South Africans Nadine Gordimer (joint winner in 1974) and JM Coetzee (who won in 1983 and 1999).
The Promise is Galgut’s ninth novel and first in seven years. He suffered childhood lymphoma, and spent long periods in sickrooms and hospitals, a time that he credits with sparking his love of books.
The Promise of the title is one made by a white South African farming family to their Black housekeeper, that she will inherit the house in which she lives, a promise that is not kept. On a macro level, it is the story of post-apartheid South Africa’s failure to fulfil the promise of the heady early days of Nelson Mandela’s presidency. The novel has a decisively Joycean Dead end, wrote reviewer Mia Levitin, with diluvian rain washing over the veld, Galgut knowingly likening it to “some cheap redemptive symbol in a story, falling from a turbulent sky on to rich and poor, happy and unhappy alike”.
Maya Jasanoff, chair of the 2021 judges, said: “The Promise astonished us from the outset as a penetrating and incredibly well-constructed account of a white South African family navigating the end of apartheid and its aftermath. On each reading we felt that the book grew. With an almost deceptive narrative economy, it offers moving insights into generational divides; meditates on what makes a fulfilling life – and how to process death; and explores the capacious metaphorical implications of ‘promise’ in relation to modern South Africa.
“Galgut’s searching examination of family, place, and the dysfunctions that connect them reminded us of William Faulkner. His deft inhabiting of different characters’ consciousnesses evokes Virginia Woolf. All this he does with a sensibility, artistry, and scope that are entirely his own. As a spectacular demonstration of how the novel can make us see and think afresh, The Promise delivers. This is a book about legacies, those we inherit and those we leave, and in awarding it this year’s Booker Prize we hope it will resonate with readers in decades to come.”
Jasanoff’s fellow judges were Horatia Harrod; Natascha McElhone; Chigozie Obioma; and Rowan Williams. The other shortlisted titles were A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam; No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood; The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed; Bewilderment by Richard Powers; and Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead.
Galgut, in an Irish Times interview with Alex Clark, revealed that his writing of The Promise had been transformed by having had to work on a film script alongside the novel to pay the bills. "I started playing with the narrative voice in the same way that the camera is a presence in a film; you still get with a movie the onward rush of a steady narrative arc, but inside that arc and inside each scene, you're jumping from one perspective to another."
Dispensing with “the illusion of realism”, acknowledging that the novel was a construction and showing readers how it was being constructed, was liberating, he said.
Galgut reflected on South Africa’s plight: “In the years immediately after the transition in 1994, there was an almost deluded euphoria over all of us that we had now arrived somewhere totally different, and things were just going to be wonderful here on in. And of course, that was naive. The truth is that a lot of the promise of those early years has been squandered, utterly squandered.
“Basically, apartheid’s dead and gone, but apartheid is still here. The laws of apartheid are not on the statute books anymore. But effectively, the economy keeps everyone more or less where they were. There’s been some evolution, I guess, in the sense that there’s a growing black middle class and there’s a new black elite in power but, by and large, the people with money and power in this country are white, and the people without it are not.”
Douglas Stuart won last year’s Booker Prize, worth £50,000, with his debut novel Shuggie Bain.
