Demise of a Family

The Promise 

by Damon Galgut

“Apartheid has fallen, see, we die right next to each other now, in intimate proximity. It's just the living part we still have to work out.”   ― Damon Galgut, The Promise

The Promise, Damon Galgut's eighth novel, is set in South Africa. I was impressed with the rich flowing narrative style, reminiscent of Faulkner in my experience. Early in the story I was struck by an allusion to Camus' novel L'Etranger, while at moments I sensed an existential aura, although not nearly as powerful as his previous Booker short-listed novel, In a Strange Room, whose protagonist, a solitary wanderer, exudes the uncertainty often found in existentialist fiction. In The Promise as in Galgut's other literature there are typical references to the complex realm of South African society and politics, particularly apartheid's impact.

 

The narrative follows the Swarts (ironically swart means black in Afrikaans), a white family descended from Dutch pioneers who arrived in South Africa in the seventeenth century. The three Swart children grow up in a world where apartheid, a system that formally separated South Africans based on race, is being phased out. Each of the novel's four parts is centered on the death of one of the Swart family members, tracing the Swarts' deterioration. Among the key aspects that augment this deterioration are divisions among both the family and their black household employees along religious, race, and age differences. Also imperative is the development of the two youngest members of the Swart family, Anton and Amor. While Amor, the youngest is too young to remember some of the darker history of apartheid, Anton is literally driven apart by it both from the family and within his own self-identity.

This book reminded me of Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March in which he used the decline of a family to mirror the the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In a similar way, Galgut's novel with its chronicle of the deaths of members of the Swart family provides a mirror or perhaps a metaphor for the dissolution of the Afrikaners' regime in South Africa. It is  profound in its details and ultimate message. Because of its roving, fluid point of view, The Promise is stylistically similar to some of the best works of literary modernism and holds its own in comparison with the great novels of J. M. Coetzee.  The narrative's deft blending of the Swart family history beside the devolution of the apartheid state in South Africa is presented in a unique and powerful way. I would recommend this to anyone who wants to better understand twentieth century South Africa.