“There has always been a feeling that South Africa was a country on the edge, but that it somehow always managed to veer away from that edge,” says Damon Galgut, whose ninth novel, The Promise, won this year’s Booker Prize for fiction on Wednesday. But now, adds the author, “the feeling is maybe we won’t.” Corruption is rampant — especially and most shockingly during the pandemic, when emergency funds were plundered — civil unrest is rising and infrastructure is collapsing. “Total collapse is not off the table.”
This bleak assessment of the fortunes of his homeland is a world away from the hope and optimism that gripped South Africa following the end of apartheid and the transition to majority rule nearly three decades ago. “It’s unspoken but the sense of promise that we all felt in 1994, the sense that South Africa could really finally transform itself, has dissipated nearly entirely,” says Galgut.
The Promise is a way of expressing the anger he feels over what has happened to South Africa. The book tells the story of the decline of an increasingly dysfunctional “ordinary” white family, the Swarts, as its members grapple with profound social and political upheaval. The story is organised around four funerals over four decades that bring the family together, with some reluctance, only to squabble and fall out.
With a nimble and inventive narrative style, Galgut takes us into the inner worlds of the various Swarts, moving deftly between the children, Anton, Astrid and Amor, their parents, relations, associates and people they meet as they try, and mostly fail, to adapt to a changing world. Threaded through them is the unresolved issue of the deathbed promise demanded by the family matriarch, Rachel, that her black maid, Salome, be given the house in which she lives. The notion of an unfulfilled promise extends beyond the specific property to encompass the unrealised ambitions of the children — and the country at large.
There are elements of the personal. Like Anton, Galgut grew up in Pretoria in the 1980s. Does he recognise parts of himself in his fictional character? “Unfortunately, yeah,” he acknowledges. “There was a time when a white male like Anton or like me would have not had to lift a finger to step into the shoes of power and privilege. It was just there for you. You were top of the pyramid.”
In the first section of the book, the youthful, rebellious Anton muses about how he wants to “eat the world”. Yet, as he later realises with bitter self-awareness, the promise of a bountiful future goes unfulfilled. To be a white male in South Africa is no longer to be top of the pyramid, as Salome’s son Lucas makes brutally clear. “I’m not mourning that,” stresses Galgut. “It is an observation.”
Galgut did not set out to write a book about South Africa. His initial focus was more personal and universal: the passing of time, ageing and mortality — something he says that, about to turn 58, he has been thinking more about recently. A conversation with a friend gave him the idea of looking at funerals as a way of organising the book. “They are events that tend to draw a family together even when they’d rather not be in the same place,” he says. “That’s when interesting things play out. Death sets things off.”
He soon realised, however, that “if you widened the window a little bit you could include the country as part of the backdrop”, opening the way to the bigger story that became The Promise.
The funerals also gave a him a “theatrical structure” for the novel. “The curtain goes up. It is just a day or two. And, 10 years later, it rises on a different scene.”
The result, according to the Booker judges, was “a spectacular demonstration of how the novel can make us see and think afresh”. It makes Galgut, who was twice shortlisted in the past, the third South African, after Nadine Gordimer and JM Coetzee, to win the prestigious £50,000 prize. While he says he would not dare to compare himself to them, he adds the prize is “gratifying”. It is “a vindication of sorts” as he has been writing since he published his first book aged 17; after many outings as a runner-up, he had become used to feeling overlooked.
When we meet the morning after the announcement he’s still a little discombobulated. Accepting the award, he said he did so on behalf of all African writers, many of whom remain unheard. He elaborates: “There is just a general sense it’s very hard to be heard if you’re from Africa”; while publishers are “not absolutely closed” to African submissions, “there is a feeling they don’t believe anything truly worthwhile is going to come out of Africa”.
That may now be changing. As well as the Booker, this year has also seen writers from Africa or with African heritage win the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Prix Goncourt, France’s premier literary award and the inspiration for the Booker Prize. To Galgut, this seems “a hopeful sign that African writing is being taken a bit more seriously”.
His own writing, he says, is a drawn-out process involving at least two handwritten drafts — he has “a fetish” for certain inks and notebooks from India. Film is a great influence. The narrative voice he deploys has, he says, “the logic of a camera” — zipping here and there, opening new angles, spinning to address the reader. But prose gets him further as it allows him to get inside the heads of his characters.
This certainly gives The Promise an intense, up-close feel. Yet critics have also highlighted that while Galgut brings to life vividly the South Africa of the Swarts, with all its customs and idioms, the insight is not extended to the black characters, in particular the critical figure of Salome, who remains largely unknown, described and observed from a distance.
Was this because he felt that as a white author he could not credibly write from the perspective of a black character? Not quite. “I want to be at pains to say that was not a capitulation to identity politics,” he says, adding that this question has been a point of discussion in South African writing for some time. Gordimer faced similar questions. Yet, says Galgut, “the entire premise of fiction is imagining how it feels to be someone else.
“There is always an edge to the map in any narrative,” he continues. “That was one edge that I consciously decided to put there in the hope that Salome’s silence would bother a reader, and that she might be amplified as a presence rather than diminished. I realise that decision is not going to satisfy all readers. But I’m content with it.”
He hopes that it “makes it evident that something is wrong, something is going on here”. Besides, says Galgut, he is bothered by books that claim to wrap everything up in the end. “It’s as if you close the book and close all its problems too. The world doesn’t work like that. I think it’s more useful to leave readers feeling rattled and disturbed because then they might be carrying a question around with them they feel they have to answer themselves.”
‘The Promise’ is published by Chatto & Windus
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