Heaven 2023: October book group: The Promise by Damon Galgut
MaryLouise
Shipmate, Host Emeritus
The Promise is a South African fiction by Damon Galgut that won the Booker Prize for 2021. It is widely appreciated as a major novel in the traditions of JM Coetzee's Disgrace, Nadine Gordimer's July's People and Marlene's van Niekerk's Agaat (Down among the Women) and Karel Schoeman's The Promised Land, looking at the realities of life for the Swart family in South Africa over four decades and concluding with adjustments to the post-apartheid realities.
It is a brilliant yet challenging read (sometimes referred to as "four funerals and a failed promise") and I'm putting up a couple of reviews for those who might want some guides or pointers to what Galgut has set out to do. A Guardian critic pointed out that it is not realist but formally inventive and neo-Modernist. As a satire on whiteness, it shows how apartheid and racism have stunted and distorted South African relationships and moral integrity. It's a darkly comic interrogation of what it means as a formerly privileged minority to have to adapt to a very different society and how the old assumptions about whiteness can be overcome.
"Living in South Africa means you’re forced to hear the way we speak to and about one another. Some of us filter out the undertones of racism, others seem content to let even the obvious overtones of hatred or condescension slide. If you listen carefully, though, you can’t help hearing the patterns we whites adopt in order to claim a particular space for ourselves, to establish where on the spectrum of entitlement we sit."
It is a brilliant yet challenging read (sometimes referred to as "four funerals and a failed promise") and I'm putting up a couple of reviews for those who might want some guides or pointers to what Galgut has set out to do. A Guardian critic pointed out that it is not realist but formally inventive and neo-Modernist. As a satire on whiteness, it shows how apartheid and racism have stunted and distorted South African relationships and moral integrity. It's a darkly comic interrogation of what it means as a formerly privileged minority to have to adapt to a very different society and how the old assumptions about whiteness can be overcome.
"Living in South Africa means you’re forced to hear the way we speak to and about one another. Some of us filter out the undertones of racism, others seem content to let even the obvious overtones of hatred or condescension slide. If you listen carefully, though, you can’t help hearing the patterns we whites adopt in order to claim a particular space for ourselves, to establish where on the spectrum of entitlement we sit."
Comments
@Caissa, good to hear!
Recently there was a successful stage performance of The Promise in Cape Town that had rave reviews. I couldn't get through to see it (roads washed away) but friends said they were surprised how comic it was, the absurdity off-setting the darkness. Here's one review.
For those who have read the novel and have time and inclination for an excellent podcast on it, here's Colm Toibin in conversation with author Damon Galgut. Some spoilers, so others might want to wait until later in the thread. For those who are undecided about tackling it or have given up at some point, this might revitalise interest.
1 The novel begins with the character Amor Swart returning home for her mother’s funeral. Does she come across as a sympathetic and reliable narrator?
2 What is the role of place in this novel given the rapid and unprecedented social changes the characters live through over 33 years from 1986? [see following post below on the family farm near Hartebeespoort Dam in Gauteng province]
3 Many of the characters are not particularly likeable. When speaking of South African literature, JM Coetzee spoke of how ‘a “deformed and stunted” society produces a deformed and stunted inner life’. To what extent are the members of the Swart family shaped by their upbringing in a brutal inhumane culture?
4 Would it be fair to say the unfulfilled promise to Amor’s mother on her deathbed becomes a curse for the Swart family as they avoid handing over the old Lombard place to Salome?
5 For all the bleakness of the novel, reviewers have also spoken of the humour, absurdity and irony throughout. Is this comic element enough to off-set the darker passages?
6 The Booker prize judges praised the ‘originality and fluidity of form' in The Promise. This is not a realist fiction so cinematic and Modernist techniques are found throughout the text. The omniscient narrator/author zooms up close and jumps from one interior monologue to another in characters, there are jumps in chronological time and the narrator often appears and addresses a presumably white English-speaking South African reader or corrects himself. Is this intrusive or successful?
7 Is an author who bumps off his characters every 70 pages or so too heartless?
8 Why is Salome so invisible not just to the other characters but to the reader?
9 Land and the possession or hunger for land is a key theme even though the land itself is not really worth anything. What might the dream of 'land' mean for so many peoples from the Americas, the Antipodes, the Middle East and African countries who have had land taken from them or who have been driven off the land their families or ancestors once farmed?
South Africa isn't by any means the largest country in Africa but it's the fifth-largest country lying entirely in the southern hemisphere. It’s bigger than every country in Europe apart from Russia, and every state in the USA except Alaska.
South Africa was colonised in turn by the Dutch, the French and the English over the centuries. The Natives Land Act of 1913 barred Black South Africans from owning land in 93% of the country. Under the white Afrikaner Nationalist Party who came to power in 1949, Black people were removed from the voters' roll, the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act made marriages between white and 'non-white' people a crime, and the Group Areas Act of 1950 made it illegal for any Black person to reside in or even enter areas of South Africa designated for white people only.
The Swarts' family farm is located in the province of Gauteng, the smallest but most populous province in the north of the country. Gauteng would have been known as the Transvaal when the novel opens. The farm itself lies outside Pretoria (now called Tshwane), half-way to the Hartebeespoort dam and the range of mountains known as the Magaliesberg. The Swart family allowed their domestic worker Salome and her small son to come and live in a broken-down house on their farm in order to prevent an Indian family from moving in. As a Black woman and legal minor, Salome would not be able to buy or own property under apartheid. Racist prejudice against Indian people was widespread. Many indentured Indian workers brought to KwaZulu-Natal to labour in sugar plantations wanted to move up to the wealthier area of Johannesburg in search of better jobs. They were not allowed to enter or live in the Free State, were banned from working in the mining industry around Johannesburg and often evicted from the Transvaal.
To reach the farm, travellers would need to take safe routes because of rioting and protests in nearby townships. This is 1986 during the State of Emergency and army conscripts (like the white character Anton) are being sent in tanks with rifles to quell unrest in the Black townships of Atteridgeville (to the west of Pretoria) and Katlehong, 28 km south-east of Johannesburg, the largest black township after Soweto. This unrest, later known as the Struggle for liberation, dates back to 1976 when black schoolgoers marched into the heart of white Johannesburg in protest against having to learn in Afrikaans and receiving an inferior education. The detention, torture and killing of these students led to national protest and many young people left the country for military training in eastern Europe and Tanzania, to return after 1994 when Mandela was elected President and South Africa achieved Black majority rule.
Most maps of South Africa still do not show the Black townships or informal settlements of Gauteng and during the 1980s there would be no road signs or indications they existed.
Map of Gauteng
Mahikeng, where Salome comes from is on the border with Botswana, and was formerly known as Mafeking, the site of one the longest sieges of the Anglo-Boer war and where the Relief of Mafeking made Colonel Baden-Powell a household name in the UK. Salome and her son Lukas would probably identify as Tswana.
I'm enjoying it more on a second read. For me the thing I struggled with on a first reading was that there were no characters I could root for. I disliked them all for various reasons. This time I'm more interested in his writing and his changes of viewpoints.
1 The novel begins with the character Amor Swart returning home for her mother’s funeral. Does she come across as a sympathetic and reliable narrator?
I found that Amor came across as a sympathetic narrator and seemed to be a reliable narrator, though I have always found the idea of a reliable narrator a bit confusing. A minority of books have narrators that are deliberately dishonest, thereby unreliable narrators. As to other narrators they will always tell the story from their own point of view and in my mind are generally honest, but another character or the reader might disagree with their version of events. I enjoy reading books where the same events are told by a variety of narrators - I wouldn't consider them unreliable, just characters with different biases and things that are important to them.
2 What is the role of place in this novel given the rapid and unprecedented social changes the characters live through over 33 years from 1986?
The family farm seemed to be a place the characters could come back to that stayed fairly unchanged. Amor and Anton even seemed uncomfortable when other family members used their childhood bedrooms for other purposes. Salome was also a constant throughout the book, outliving most of the family. Though all the family except Amor did not really value Salome's care for them and how much easier she made their lives, she still seemed to be a comforting figure to the Swart children.
3 Many of the characters are not particularly likeable. When speaking of South African literature, JM Coetzee spoke of how ‘a “deformed and stunted” society produces a deformed and stunted inner life’. To what extent are the members of the Swart family shaped by their upbringing in a brutal inhumane culture?
Apart from losing their mother Astrid seemed to have a privileged life with most of her problems caused by her life decisions. Perhaps this was influenced by her father who also couldn't fully value and show love to his wife and children unless they were sick or injured (Amor after being struck by lightening) and also cheated on his wife like Astrid did her husbands. Amor seemed to chose a difficult, but mostly fulfilling life, helping others. Though she also struggled to connect and form deep relationships with her intimate partners. Anton may have had a different life if he hadn't been drafted into the army, murdered the stone throwing woman and then lived on society's margins being harmed by others in his attempts to survive. His life path seems to be most affected by the brutal culture during apartheid.
I know a couple of white South Africans who now live in Australia and who both faced both physical violence and emotional blackmail in the home. One also faced violence at school where he was one of the few children of English rather than Afrikaans ancestry so in his view was treated unfairly by the Afrikaans teachers (this was an all white school during apartheid). There was a lot of corporal punishment both at home and school for any small reason or no reason at all. These two people I know have not allowed their childhoods or growing up in a violent culture to stop them caring for others, though they have suffered ongoing trauma from their childhoods, and both are deeply spiritual as well. The man actively fought apartheid. The non-white South Africans I know have lived in Australia since childhood and seemed to have had caring families and not to have been affected by the violence of South African recent history.
Of course Australia also has its dark past, but the dynamics are different due to white colonisers quickly becoming the majority of the population and Indigenous Australians being pushed to the outskirts of cities, regional towns and poorer areas of the inner cities or moved from isolated homelands to missions. So many white Australians barely knew or interacted with Indigenous Australians, something that continues today for non-Indigenous Australians. (From 1901 to the 1960s non-white immigration was extremely restricted by racist policies so only more recently has Australia become much more multicultural.)
I felt the Swart family was a bit too shallow for reality and if anything were warped by their over-privileged childhoods where Salome and the farm workers did everything for them.
4 Would it be fair to say the unfulfilled promise to Amor’s mother on her deathbed becomes a curse for the Swart family as they avoid handing over the old Lombard place to Salome?
I didn't think it was a curse, given the novel has some supernatural aspects, such as ghosts and possibly evil spirits (as viewed by the homeless man), but a curse is never mentioned. Sometimes families are unlucky or make dangerous life choices. In one branch of my family three of the brothers died by accidentally drinking strychnine after mistaking it for pain medication, burning to death after falling asleep while smoking and being hit by a train (coincidentally in South Africa, possibly not accidental). Their sister, my 2nd Great Grandmother, lost one baby to illness and another rolled down a hill in its pram and drowned in a creek. Then her husband drowned in a dam while wetting the wheels of his horse drawn buggy, along with a neighbour's child. You would think the family was cursed or the author was being unrealistic if all of that happened in a novel! That doesn't include a number of other crazy events and bad luck that didn't end in deaths in that branch of the family.
5 For all the bleakness of the novel, reviewers have also spoken of the humour, absurdity and irony throughout. Is this comic element enough to off-set the darker passages?
I couldn't really see the humour at all the first time I read it, but appreciated the dark humour more during the second reading. I don't generally chose books with dark humour to read however.
7 Is an author who bumps off his characters every 70 pages or so too heartless?
I wouldn't say the author was heartless, but the book did lack some warmth that another author may have infused the story with. Amor and Salome were the only likeable characters and that may be because we don't see enough of them to know their faults.
8 Why is Salome so invisible not just to the other characters but to the reader?
The family takes Salome for granted and also the fact of having African servants as a normal part of life. She almost seems part of the furniture. At least Anton has the decency not to fire her or send her away from her home, even when his wife pressures him to do so.
I'm still not sure how I feel about the parallel framing incidents of Amor's periods starting at a funeral when she is a teen and her menopausal flushes at the end of the novel. This felt too essentialist for me.
At the same time the author holds back from showing interiority with Salome or Lukas, something I read as indicating the ignorance most white South Africans have about fellow Black South Africans, unable to speak vernacular languages and never having visited a township or rural village. The underlying thinking is that while a white South African writer can do enough research to satisfy white readers, it would not be convincing enough for Black readers who have lived through what is just distant general knowledge for whites.
Many South Africans who emigrated to Australia have merged almost seamlessly into what they found to be a similar settler culture but there is now a 'semigration' aspect because many return to the Cape or Karoo or Gauteng at regular intervals with children or grandchildren to show where they were born or to try and make sense of old memories or experience post-apartheid life here, to connect with Black citizens and culture in a way that wasn't possible before.
I never really got a handle on Amor's character. People said she came across as sympathetic, but you never really found anything out about her other than she seemed scared of being committed to relationships. I never even worked out why she decided to become a nurse.
2 What is the role of place in this novel given the rapid and unprecedented social changes the characters live through over 33 years from 1986?
I thought this was a clever device, and it highlights the way most of us change our opinions to match the prevailing mores of the time.
3 Many of the characters are not particularly likeable. When speaking of South African literature, JM Coetzee spoke of how ‘a “deformed and stunted” society produces a deformed and stunted inner life’. To what extent are the members of the Swart family shaped by their upbringing in a brutal inhumane culture?
This was one of the flaws of the book for me as I couldn't empathise with any of the characters. I felt a certain sympathy for Anton at first, and I certainly identify with the unfinished novel he was writing, but by the end I'd lost interest in what happened to him.
4 Would it be fair to say the unfulfilled promise to Amor’s mother on her deathbed becomes a curse for the Swart family as they avoid handing over the old Lombard place to Salome?
I'm not sure about that. it's a good device to have running through the novel, but I'm not sure that any of the characters other than Amor, Salome or Lucas actually ever though about the promise.
5 For all the bleakness of the novel, reviewers have also spoken of the humour, absurdity and irony throughout. Is this comic element enough to off-set the darker passages?
I could see some black humour in it, the dreadful pastor for instance, and Tantie Marnie wanting to check her brother was really dead. It seemed to fade away by the end of the book though.[/B]
6 The Booker prize judges praised the ‘originality and fluidity of form' in The Promise. This is not a realist fiction so cinematic and Modernist techniques are found throughout the text. The omniscient narrator/author zooms up close and jumps from one interior monologue to another in characters, there are jumps in chronological time and the narrator often appears and addresses a presumably white English-speaking South African reader or corrects himself. Is this intrusive or successful?
I found the style interesting, and at first I spent a lot of time considering it. After that wanting to know what happened next took over.
7 Is an author who bumps off his characters every 70 pages or so too heartless?[?B]
I thought bumping the characters off was a good device to move the story forward, but then again I like black humour.
8 Why is Salome so invisible not just to the other characters but to the reader?
I found @MaryLouise 's observations on this interesting, and am inclined to agree with them.
9 Land and the possession or hunger for land is a key theme even though the land itself is not really worth anything. What might the dream of 'land' mean for so many peoples from the Americas, the Antipodes, the Middle East and African countries who have had land taken from them or who have been driven off the land their families or ancestors once farmed?
I don't think I'm qualified to answer this question.
This was the second time I read the book. Both times I thought it started really strongly, and then tailed off as the story progressed. I also have the feeling that I wouldn't like Galgut if I met him, in the same way I don't think I'd get on with Ian McEwan. Elizabeth Gaskell on the other hand....
One thing I did identify with, and Galgut takes this from JM Coetzee, is how certain kinds of societies in extremis shape and stunt those raised in those conditions. For many older Black people who grew up under apartheid, the experience was dehumanisisng and that comes through in the literature of Zakes Mda, Can Themba, or Bessie Head who showed how racism affected every aspect of their lives. What The Promise shows is that the same is true for those who benefited and internalised the violence and cruelty. I know that when I was given a scholarship to study at University of Cape Town I came down from Zimbabwe (white supremacist itself in many ways but not legally sanctioned) and was appalled that Black people could not use compartments on trains designated for whites, that they had to enter shops and post offices through doors labelled "non-white". But after living in Cape Town for a couple of years in the progressive bubble that was a multiracial UCT, I stopped noticing the daily separations and even with armoured vehicles and soldiers patrolling the streets, the scenes erupting down the road in the townships could have been happening in another country. The knowledge of injustice and 'wrongness' is suppressed. That abnormality was the reality of characters like Anton and his family.
'Land' is one of those chimeric fantasies hard to describe: if you think about the recent outcry over the vandalism of the lone Sycamore Gap tree at Hadrian's Wall, we're not just talking about a careless act of vandalism but of the desecration of landscape and a shared British history held to be worth cherishing. What happened in South Africa and this is a subtext of the novel, is that there was no restorative justice in terms of handing over economic power and the prime land (mostly in the Cape) was sold to international buyers and consortiums. Much property in South Africa remains as unaffordable for Black citizens as it did under apartheid. Future owners of the Swarts' farm are unlikely to be able to farm or make money and ownership of the land will always be contested.
I'm fairly sure I'd also get along with Elizabeth Gaskell!
She is as reliable as any other narration pov in the book. She is possibly the most sympathetic character in the book. That said, it is at times difficult to access her motivations.
2 What is the role of place in this novel given the rapid and unprecedented social changes the characters live through over 33 years from 1986? [see following post below on the family farm near Hartebeespoort Dam in Gauteng province] The major place, the farm doesn’t change, but the country and world around it does. The farm itself though deteriorates as piece by piece of the family is eliminated.
3 Many of the characters are not particularly likeable. When speaking of South African literature, JM Coetzee spoke of how ‘a “deformed and stunted” society produces a deformed and stunted inner life’. To what extent are the members of the Swart family shaped by their upbringing in a brutal inhumane culture?
They are all broken individuals. They all benefit from the apartheid system and are also diminished by it.
4 Would it be fair to say the unfulfilled promise to Amor’s mother on her deathbed becomes a curse for the Swart family as they avoid handing over the old Lombard place to Salome? I am not sure it is a curse but it is certainly a touchstone for all of the action in the novel. As the family refuses this request it dies off one piece at a time.
6 The Booker prize judges praised the ‘originality and fluidity of form' in The Promise. This is not a realist fiction so cinematic and Modernist techniques are found throughout the text. The omniscient narrator/author zooms up close and jumps from one interior monologue to another in characters, there are jumps in chronological time and the narrator often appears and addresses a presumably white English-speaking South African reader or corrects himself. Is this intrusive or successful?
I found all of the povs useful in furthering the plot. I am not quite convinced that the omniscient narrator was always reliable.
7 Is an author who bumps off his characters every 70 pages or so too heartless?
It moved the plot along. Each death seemed to happen in a fitting manner given the brokenness of the characters. Ex. Manie was a bit of a snake in the grass. Anton’s alcoholism and eventual suicide related back to his inability to resolve his feelings over the woman he killed.
8 Why is Salome so invisible not just to the other characters but to the reader?
It reflects how most of the family perceived her. She was an absent symbol. Giving her the house would have been a simple act of reconciliation.
The farm is also the site of a failed spiritual nexus: Rachel reverts back to Judaism, Manie turns hyper-evangelical; a portion of the farm is donated to the Dutch Reformed Church and later turns into a pentecostal 'miracle' side-show; the secretive and sinister dominee Alwyn Simmers has his counterpart in the Catholic priest who betrays Astrid's last confession. Mito the yoga instructor is cryptic and ambiguous. As you note, it is all about brokenness and I think the bleakness of the plot makes for tough reading.
Thank you for these helpful insights!
(ETA: Incidentally, I grew up in the Christian Reformed Church in Canada, which is one of the immigrant versions of the Dutch Reformed Church. I recognize the Dutch Reformed Church of the novel.)
Damon Galgut is working in an Afrikaans/English tradition of pastoral known as the plaasroman or farm novel. One of the more famous novels in this tradition is Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, published in 1883. Another farm novel that was made into an award-winning film was Karel Schoeman's Promised Land (1976) and the Nobel prize-winner JM Coetzee writes versions of rural escape in several of his novels. Marlene van Niekerk's novel Agaat, translated and published overseas as Down Among the Women, is set in the area of the Overberg where I live, a brilliant hard look at an old farm handed over to a farm worker and carer when the son decides he has no future in Africa.