BOOK OF THE WEEK

The Promise by Damon Galgut review – legacies of apartheid

The Booker-shortlisted novelist examines South Africa’s broken promises over the last three decades through the story of one white family

Analysis / The 2021 Booker shortlist tunes in to the worries of our age

Nadifa Mohamed is sole British writer to make Booker prize shortlist

Booker Prize 2021 shortlist unveiled as race for £50,000 prize hots up

Jon Day

Friday 18 June 2021

I

n Damon Galgut’s 2008 book The Impostor, a man named Adam loses his job and moves to a shack in the Karoo to try to write poetry. Like Galgut himself, who wrote his debut novel, A Sinless Season, when he was 17, Adam’s first collection – “poems about the natural world, ardent and intense and romantic” – was published when he was a young man. But Adam has become aware of the weight of history since then, and wonders whether such poetry is acceptable in contemporary South Africa:

When his first collection had come out he’d been astounded by one especially vitriolic review, which had charged him with deliberately avoiding the moral crisis at the heart of South Africa. He’d had no ideological project in mind with his pursuit of Beauty, and he’d been stung at the suggestion that he was indifferent to suffering. But in his weakest moments he reflected privately that maybe it was true; maybe he didn’t care enough for people.

 

The fall of apartheid promised to give South African novelists licence to write, as Galgut said in an interview in 2003, about “things like love … which would have been considered slightly immoral as a theme until apartheid crashed”, but his own novels have only become more politically engaged over the course of his career. His early works were sometimes criticised – like Adam’s poetry – for abnegating their moral responsibilities. Both A Sinless Season (1982), a novel of boyhood cruelty set in a young offenders’ prison (Galgut has since disavowed it), and the novella which formed the backbone of his collection Small Circle of Beings (1988) – a stark domestic miniature about a mother caring for her ill child – were precocious and emotionally perceptive, but neither seemed particularly interested in the world outside themselves.