"The Promise" by Damon Galgut

Winner of the 2021 Booker Prize. For other winners of the Booker see here.

The Swarts are a white South African farming family, clinging on to their way of life through the political changes marking the end of apartheid and the birth of the new majority-rule  country. At the start of the book the mother of the family dies; on her deathbed she makes her husband promise to gift to the maidservant the house in which she (the servant) lives with her son. The refusal to honour this promise seems to act as a curse. 

The parallels with the decline of the nation are obvious. Swarts?

This beautifully written book is told through multiple interior monologues (though the thoughts are usually fairly well-formed and there seemed to be more tell than show; the author-in-character sometimes speaks directly to the reader), head-hopping in a 'PoV tag' sort of way that reminded me of Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. 

Selected quotes:

The page numbers refer to the Chatto & Windus 2021 hardback edition.

• "Some of the other girls say Miss Starkey is a lesbian, but it's hard to imagine her doing anything sexy with anyone. Or maybe she did once and has been permanently disgusted ever since." (p 3)
• "Tannie Marina is always baking things and trying to feed them to people. Her sister Astrid says it's so she doesn't have to be fat alone." (p 5)
• "She is prone to paranoid fears like these, suspecting sometimes that her mind can be secretly read by people around her, or that life is an elaborate performance in which everybody else is acting and she alone is not." (p 24)
• "No need to dwell on the image of the old woman with her knickers around her ankles and her finger up her fundament, at such moments she feels very far from God. " (p 46)
• "You don't think about sex, you suffer it. A scratchy, hungry thing going on in the basement." (p 54)
• "It is not always possible to please two white people simultaneously." (p 66)
• "Survival isn't instructive, just demeaning." (p 94)
• "Oh, yes. When you've claimed a man's gun, you claim the man too. Law of the frontier. Oh, balls, Anton, who scripts these thoughts for you?" (p 145)
• "Not every chance is an opportunity. Sometimes a chance is just a waste of time." (p 157)
• "When white people fight, her mother declares without a scrap of rational evidence, it is always over property!" (p 252)
• "No love left, only kindness, which is maybe stronger. More durable, anyhow." (p 257)
• "Fornication rates all over the country rise dramatically on the night of Zuma's resignation." (p 271)
• "She has been harbouring a secret hope that her husband's life work might just turn out to be a masterpiece. Who knows, even better than Wilbur Smith. Imagine!" (p 279)
• "And when the storm finally passes, in the small hours, it leaves a dripping calmness behind it. Snails unfurl themselves in the undergrowth and push forth, little galleons on a dark green sea, trailing their little silver wakes. From the soil, musky pheromonal odours twine up like tendrils on the air." (p 291)

April 2022; 293 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God