“She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on.” This is how Mrs. Dalloway thinks of herself, early in Virginia Woolf’s novel. It’s an even better description of how Woolf writes—how she passes between and beyond her characters, their anima and ghost, immanent and posthumous at once. “Mrs. Dalloway” appeared in 1925; two years later, in “To the Lighthouse,” Woolf would slice through her characters and even more flagrantly stand outside them and look on. In its famous middle section, “Time Passes,” Woolf describes how a decade elapses in an uninhabited country house, as the wallpaper peels away, the books rot, and the animals come to stay. The writing is both domestically meticulous (“The swallows nested in the drawing-room. . . . Tortoise-shell butterflies burst from the chrysalis and pattered their life out on the windowpane”) and gravely allegorical: the First World War sends out its tremors, characters die offstage, the sea boils with blood, the house almost falls but is finally saved. The house has come to represent a country and an era, and the novelist, who has become nothing less than time itself, rides the winds of history.
In scope, seriousness, and experimental ambition, modernist writing like Woolf’s sometimes appears to have expired along with its serious and experimental epoch, a moment when political and moral disenchantment was met by a belief in literature’s regenerative power. Yet Damon Galgut’s remarkable new novel, “The Promise” (Europa), suggests that the demands of history and the answering cry of the novel can still powerfully converge. As a white South African writer, Galgut inherits a subject that must feel, at different times, liberating in its dimensions and imprisoning in its inescapability. (J. M. Coetzee once argued that South African literature is a “literature in bondage,” because a “deformed and stunted” society produces a deformed and stunted inner life.) “The Promise” is drenched in South African history, a tide that can be seen, in the end, to poison all “promise.” The book moves from the dying days of apartheid, in the eighties, to the disappointment of Jacob Zuma’s Presidency of the past decade, and the tale is told as the fable of a family curse: first the mother dies, then the father, then one of their daughters, then their only son.
Galgut’s work has often demonstrated an appreciation of modernist techniques and emphases; his previous novel, “Arctic Summer” (2014), gently fictionalized E. M. Forster’s first trip to India, in 1912, out of which came Forster’s masterpiece, “A Passage to India.” Like a number of early-twentieth-century novels (“Howards End” and “Brideshead Revisited” come to mind, along with “To the Lighthouse”), “The Promise” turns on the question of a house and its land (in this case, the Swart family farm), and who will live in it, inherit it, redeem it. But Galgut’s novel most closely resembles the work of predecessors like Woolf and Faulkner in the way it redeploys a number of modernist techniques, chiefly the use of a free-floating narrator. Galgut is at once very close to his troubled characters and somewhat ironically distant, as if the novel were written in two time signatures, fast and slower. And, miraculously, this narrative distance does not alienate our intimacy but emerges as a different form of knowing.
“The Promise” is broken into four sections of seventy pages or so, each one named for the character whose death summons the family to the farm, just outside Pretoria—four seasons of unchanging weather. The first section, entitled “Ma,” introduces us to the unhappy and divided Swart clan. Three children arrive to mourn Rachel, their mother: thirteen-year-old Amor, who has been sent away to a school she hates; her older sister, Astrid; and the eldest child, Anton, a nineteen-year-old doing his national service as a rifleman in the South African Army. The Swart children are Afrikaners, except that their mother was Jewish, and had converted to her husband’s Dutch Reformed Christianity. Not long before she died, Rachel converted back to Judaism, a fact that enrages her grieving, patriarchal husband, Manie Albertus Swart. Yet it was not Manie who nursed Rachel at the end but the family’s Black housekeeper, Salome: “She was with Ma when she died, right there next to the bed, though nobody seems to see her, she is apparently invisible. And whatever Salome feels is invisible too” is how the book’s spectral, omniscient narrator summarizes the politics of the situation.
Anton, the unhappiest of the three children, is at war with his family; Astrid accommodates; and young Amor, the family’s conscience, watches. In Amor’s role as witness and spy, she overheard a crucial pledge, which gives the novel its title: her dying mother made her husband promise that Salome would become the owner of the house she currently lives in, a three-room structure on the family estate. Now that Rachel is dead, the promise to Salome can be quickly forgotten. “I’m already paying for her son’s education,” Manie complains. “Must I do everything for her?” Amor badgers her relatives to honor her mother’s last wish, but the most receptive family member, Anton (who seems to like the idea mainly because it irritates their father), informs Amor that the gesture is probably illegal, anyway.
It is as if Ma’s death and the unkept promise had released a nimbus of dread. Only nine years later, in the novel’s second section (entitled “Pa”), the family reunites again, this time for their father’s funeral. A robust and religious man, Manie owned a reptile park called Scaly City. But one of his snakes has fatally bitten him. Amor, now grown up, lives in London, and, when she calls home, the ringing of the unanswered phone “almost physically conjures for her the empty rooms and passages down which it carries. That corner. That ornament. That sill.”
It is 1995; Nelson Mandela is the country’s President. When Amor arrives in Pretoria for the funeral, she’s struck by the city’s festive atmosphere. South Africa, long exiled from international sports, is playing France in the Rugby World Cup semifinals. Our narrator, wandering somewhere between Amor’s point of view and a kind of novelistic chorus, is briskly ironic: “Never did the middle of town look like this, so many black people drifting casually about, as if they belong here. It’s almost like an African city!” Family dynamics have shifted, somewhat. Astrid is now unhappily married, with two kids, and having an affair with “the man who came to put in our security.” Amor, once the disdained runt, is now considered glamorous. Other tensions are unchanged. Amor again raises the question of the promise made to Salome, and is again rebuffed. Anton, who deserted the Army years ago, is sponging off a girlfriend, and is mired in an aimless unemployability. Still militantly unhappy, he cannot mourn his estranged father. At the family farm, which the three children now inherit, “a thin pelt of dust has settled on every surface.”
Summaries like this act as a kind of bad translation, in which what is most distinctive and precious about the novel disappears, to be replaced by time-lapse photography; the plot, on its own, can seem gothically extreme. (There are two deaths still to go: Astrid and Anton are yet to be sacrificed.) But the novel’s beautifully peculiar narration aerates and complicates this fatal family fable, and turns plot into deep meditation. It’s not the first time that Galgut has experimented with a shifting viewpoint. His novel “In a Strange Room,” which was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 2010, moved between third person and first person; since the narrator of that novel was also called Damon, and the story took something of the form of a travelogue, the effect was suggestively autofictional. His new novel exercises new freedoms. One is struck, amid the sombre events, by the joyous, puckish restlessness of the storytelling, which seems to stick to a character’s point of view only to veer away, mid-sentence. Driving to the farm, for instance, Manie’s brother indulges in a bit of Afrikaner self-aggrandizement: “He’s not in the mood for political speeches, much nicer to look at the view. He imagines himself one of his Voortrekker ancestors, rolling slowly into the interior in an ox-wagon. Yes, there are those who dream in predictable ways. Ockie the brave pioneer, floating over the plain.” The narration even flows away from itself, into little ironic eddies: “The house is dark, except for floodlights fore and aft, note the nautical terms, illuminating the driveway and the lawn.” Or: “In the hearse, I mean the house, a certain unspoken fear has ebbed.”
Galgut uses his narrator playfully, assisted by nicely wayward run-on sentences. Technically, it’s a combination of free indirect style (third-person narration pegged to a specific character) and what might be called unidentified free indirect style (third-person narration pegged to a shadowy narrator, or a vague village chorus). As the Portuguese novelist José Saramago does, Galgut outsources his storytelling, handing off a phrase or an insight to an indistinct community of what seem to be wise elders, who then produce an ironically platitudinous or proverbial commentary. After describing how Ma’s ghost is visiting the farm, Galgut adds, “How would you know she is a ghost? Many of the living are vague and adrift too, it’s not a failing unique to the departed.” And here he writes about Salome and Anton: “She has seen him grow up, from a tottering infant to a golden boy to this, whatever he is now, tending to him every step of the way. When he was little he used to call her Mama and tried to suck on her nipple, a common South African confusion.” Though Galgut’s narrator has the authority of omniscience, it’s used lightly, glancingly, so that this perilous all-knowingness often makes his characters not more transparent but more mysterious: “Dr. Raaff wields his tweezers with more-than-usual dexterity. . . . His fastidiousness is pleasing to his patients, but if they only knew the daydreams of Dr. Wally Raaff, few would submit to being examined by him.” (Those daydreams stay in the private domain of Dr. Raaff.) Galgut is wonderfully, Woolfianly adept at moving quickly between characters’ thoughts. At a funeral, at a party, in the middle of the night as the family members sleep in the farmhouse, Galgut’s narrator skims across his spaces, alighting, stinging, moving on to the next subject. As the novel proceeds, his narrator seems to grow in adventurous authority. At one moment, he drops into the minds of a couple of jackals, scavenging on the veldt: “It is necessary to renew their markings, using bodily juices, to lay down the border. Beyond here is us. Written in piss and shit, inscribed from the core.”
And, again like Woolf, Galgut finds the prospect of slipping into an uninhabited house all-tempting:
The narration enlivens the book, and one is grateful for the steady beat of humor. The double consciousness of the authorial irony “corrects” the characters, puts them in their place; in so doing, it also makes their lives blessedly provisional and brief, as if the author were reminding us that this particular story, with all its specific horrors, also belongs to a universal history that will soon forget them. Not for nothing does the narrator remind us, and his characters, on the last page of the book, that “other stories will write themselves over yours, scratching out every word. Even these.”
The reader will surely need this teasing authorial doubleness, as a brace against an implacable darkening. The novel’s third section (“Astrid”) brings home the dwindling Swart survivors for another family funeral: Astrid has been killed in a carjacking. Again, history moves forward jerkily, in furlongs of family time, like those juddering minute hands on old railway-station clocks. It is 2004, and Thabo Mbeki is about to start his second term as South Africa’s President. Anton, who is drinking heavily, lives on the farm, where he is working intermittently on an unfinishable novel, one concerning, he says, “the torments of the human condition. Nothing unusual.” Amor now lives in Durban, where she is a nurse in an H.I.V. ward. She’s thirty-one, starting to gray, but still morally aflame: when she presses her brother on “the promise,” he fobs her off. In 2018, when Anton dies, in the fourth section of the novel, only Salome is left to phone Amor. The youngest inherits the farm, along with Anton’s widow, Desirée. There is one thing left for Amor to do—renounce her inheritance and insure that Salome, who is now an old woman, finally becomes the legal owner of the house she has occupied for decades.
Coetzee’s “Disgrace,” another novel about a farm, history’s poison, and the question of inheritance, inevitably shadows “The Promise.” In both books, a certain kind of allegorical pressure, partly insisted on by the author and partly by history itself, makes the story gigantically, uncomfortably representative. (It is perhaps what Coetzee meant by a literature held in bondage.) The Swart farm cannot be just a family property but must also come to stand in for debatable land, and perhaps also for an entire contested country. The force of the fable is explicit, becoming more so as the novel gathers its significances. An Afrikaner family has occupied the farmhouse for many years but is cursed to perish, to leave it, and to wander—at Astrid’s funeral, the pastor likens such people to the seed of Cain, exiled from a paradisal land. In the novel’s accounting, white South Africans cannot inherit this land, and do not deserve to: Anton’s low sperm count means that he and Desirée could not have children, and Amor, too, is childless. The optimistic harvest of “Howards End”—children, the very future, at play before the grand old house—has spoiled. As in “Disgrace,” the only posture appropriate for white people seems to be atonement and divestment: Amor selflessly at work in the hospital wards, single in Durban, without family or farm.
If anything, “The Promise” feels more pessimistic than “Disgrace.” In its closing pages, the South African experiment seemingly teeters. Government is corrupt; there are power outages and water shortages, harbingers of worse to come. And when Amor finally makes good on the promise—the moment the novel has been patiently preparing for—Salome’s son, Lukas, who played with Amor when they were kids, is not grateful but angry. Who can blame him? “My mother was supposed to get this house a long time back,” he says. “Thirty years ago! Instead she got lies and promises. And you did nothing.” Even when Amor offers to empty her bank account for Salome and Lukas, the promise has come too late, or come to naught. Like his country, Anton had much promise; his unfinished novel was about a young man who grew up on a farm, and was “full of promise and ambition.” But then, when Amor asks Lukas what has happened to the sweet boy she once knew, he says, “Life. Life happened.” Can Amor’s loving, self-sacrificial kenosis offer a feasible political model? Or is she a holy outlier, an eccentric lost in her saintly inefficacy? Amid this general banking down of possibility, it’s striking that, in a novel marked by the adventurous journeying of its narrator, the perspective of Salome, the very pivot of the book, is barely inhabited. Her ambitions, her thinking, her future, remain largely, and pointedly, unheard. Galgut makes a bitterly deliberate case for such silence—underlining the idea that Salome has indeed been silenced by those in control of her destiny—and insures that it is both eloquent and saddening. ♦
