How Damon Galgut fulfilled his promise

After scooping the coveted Booker prize and the £50,000 (R1m) that goes with it for his novel The Promise, Damon Galgut said it had taken him a long time to reach this point "and now that I have, I kind of feel that I shouldn’t be here".

Speaking at the awards ceremony in London, Galgut, 57, said the accolade could just as easily have gone to any of the other talented people on the short list.

"But seeing as the good fortune’s fallen to me," said the Capetonian author, "let me say this has been a great year for African writing and I’d like to accept this on behalf of all the stories told and untold — the writers heard and unheard from the remarkable continent that I’m part of. Please keep listening to us, there’s a lot more to come."

When the prize was first awarded in 1969, only novels by writers in the UK and its former colonies were eligible, but today any English-language novel qualifies, as long as it’s published in the UK.

SA writers have won four times in the 52 years since it was first awarded: Nadine Gordimer in 1974 for The Conservationist; JM Coetzee for The Life & Times of Michael K in 1983, and again in 1999 for Disgrace; and now Galgut.

It suggests local literature has always punched above its weight. Last month, Galgut told the FM that SA literature has a power rivalled by few other countries. "I guess SA’s social and moral questions are a heavy weight for its citizens. But for its writers, in an amoral sense, it does provide rich material, because we have powerful themes, we have powerful subjects and they’re real," he said.

"This is not science fiction or an imagined universe — it’s where we actually live. I always feel slightly uncomfortable saying that, because you’re always talking about issues and problems that really have a human cost attached to them. But literature happens in a bubble and in a bubble these are very interesting abstractions to debate."

Braced for failure

Galgut wasn’t wrong about it having taken him a long time to win the prize. This was the third time he’d been short-listed — the first being in 2003 for The Good Doctor and then in 2010, for In a Strange Room.

As a result, Galgut told the BBC on the morning after the ceremony: "I’m not used to winning things, actually, I just assumed that would be the case last night so perhaps nobody was more amazed than me when things went my way."

To many others, it wasn’t a surprise at all. Maya Jasanoff, chair of the panel of judges, said The Promise "has an incredible originality and fluidity of voice, [and is] dense with historical, metaphorical significance."

The judges praised its "unusual narrative style that balances Faulknerian exuberance with Nabokovian precision, pushes boundaries, and is a testament to the flourishing of the novel in the 21st century".

The book tells the story of a white SA family, the Swarts (an "in-joke", he says), who live on a farm outside Pretoria. Their story is told through four funerals between 1986 and 2016, which helps paint a portrait of the country’s tectonic cultural and racial shifts over that time.

But at the centre of it all runs a promise, made to the Swarts’ black housekeeper Salome by the dying matriarch Rachel in 1986, that Salome be given ownership of a dilapidated house on the farm, in which she lives. It’s a promise that splits the family, as the son Anton resists following through, even as his sister Amor is determined that it should happen.

Galgut told the BBC that the idea had come to him after speaking to an elderly friend who was the last surviving member of his family. He told Galgut a series of anecdotes about the four family funerals he attended — his mother, father, brother and sister — "which you’d think would make for very gloomy subject matter but he’s a funny man, and he made me laugh".

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Critics instantly loved the "four-act drama". The New York Times Review of Books described Galgut as "a gleeful satirist, mordantly skewering his characters’ fecklessness and hypocrisy" in the book.

Galgut told The New York Times that he wanted to use the novel to document the hopes and disappointments of the post-apartheid period. But critically, he said the idea wasn’t to tell a moralistic tale of heroes and oppressors, or provide a collective catharsis that revealed a path forward for SA.

And the themes in The Promise, he told the newspaper, were still painfully relevant today. "The topic of land, who owns it, who used to own it, who is going to own it in the future, that topic is very central to SA political life now."

The novel reflects Galgut’s disappointment with where SA is today. As he told The Guardian newspaper, the government’s corruption during Covid pushed the country "over the edge into some unknown terrain".

"We are used to the idea of politicians stealing, but politicians stealing in a situation like this seemed absolutely morally bankrupt," he said.

As a result, he said, the country isn’t in a great place. "The sense of promise that we had in 1994 was palpable. And that promise has pretty much dissipated."

Postscript to a bleak era

For Galgut, the Booker prize is a profound triumph — not least because in the seven years it took to write, a battle with the SA Revenue Service (Sars) meant he nearly ran out of money.

Galgut told the FM that, as a result, he’d been on the verge of renting out his Cape Town apartment and moving in with his mother in Pretoria — which is something "you only do in your 20s".

He said he helped a friend finance a restaurant, but then Sars slapped him with a huge tax bill. It was only thanks to a US film director, who fortuitously arrived on his doorstep to buy the film rights for an earlier book of his, The Quarry, that he was able to avoid moving back in with his mom.

"It’s much easier if you’re a prolific writer and you’re producing something every year, but I’m not that guy. It’s been seven years since I published my last book. Times got quite lean," he said.

Not for nothing is Galgut frequently compared to JM Coetzee. The New Yorker magazine even argued that if anything, The Promise feels more pessimistic than Disgrace.

In July, the Independent in Ireland argued that all Galgut’s novels share an existential anguish at the centre of their characters’ lives.

"They struggle with themselves, with their family, with the tangled politics of a country they have found themselves in; they struggle with loved ones, with God, or God’s absence."

The newspaper said Galgut had written a novel that goes to the heart of political instability, to petty greed, desire and into the depths of the human heart, to reveal the contradictions of our fragile condition.

"He’s done it with mastery, guile and a generous amount of empathy. The Promise is a masterpiece."