The Promise

Summary

The Promise is a family saga spanning four decades, each of which features a death in the family. It concerns the Afrikaner Swart family and their farm located outside Pretoria. The family consists of Manie, his wife Rachel, and their children Anton, Astrid, and Amor.

In 1986, Rachel dies after a long illness. Before passing, she expresses her dying wish to Manie that their black domestic servant, Salome, be given ownership of the house in which she resides on the family’s property. This promise, overheard by a young Amor, is made by Manie, but he claims no memory of having made it at the wake, and shows no intention of fulfilling it, especially as Salome cannot legally own property under the country’s Apartheid laws.

In 1995, post-Apartheid, the siblings reunite at the family farm after Manie suffers a fatal snakebite, with Anton having spent 10 years living a transient lifestyle after deserting the army in 1986, Astrid now married with twins, and Amor having lived in England for several years. Although she is now legally able to own her house, the will does not make provision for Salome, and instead makes the three co-owners of the land. Anton moves back in to the farmhouse, and assures Amor he will follow through on the promise.

In 2004, Anton is in a loveless marriage with his childhood sweetheart, Desirée, and heavily in debt, while Astrid is married to her second husband and Amor is working as a nurse in an HIV ward in Durban, where she lives with her long-term girlfriend. Despite Amor’s appeals, the promise has not been honoured, and Astrid and Anton continue to resist her. Secretly, Astrid has been having an affair with her husband’s business partner, and after being denied penance by her priest during confession, is murdered in a hijacking. Before her funeral, Amor makes a final appeal to Anton to fulfil their father’s promise, but when she refuses to support his plan to sell some of the land on their farm, the matter is unresolved, and Amor returns to Durban, never to see Anton again.

In 2018, Anton has sunk into alcoholism and deep depression due to his failed marriage, impotence, trauma over the killing of a civilian in the army, and the feeling that he has wasted his life. One night, after getting into a fight with Desirée in a drunken stupor, Anton commits suicide. Amor, now living in Cape Town after leaving her girlfriend and her job in Durban, is finally informed of his death by Salome. Now the only surviving member of her family, she gifts the now-derelict family farm to Desirée, minus Salome’s house, which she legally transfers to her, finally fulfilling her mother’s promise. She also gives Salome her share of her father’s inheritance, which she has refused to touch up to this point.

Quotes

The driver of the long car, Mervyn Glass, has been sitting for the past two hours in the kitchen, wearing his yarmulke, waiting on the instruction of the bossy woman, the sister of the bereaved, who is now telling him to get moving. This is a very difficult family, he can’t work out what’s going on, but doesn’t appear to mind. Waiting in respectful silence is an essential part of the job and he has developed the capacity to simulate deep calm while experiencing none of it. In his core, Mervyn Glass is a frantic man.

But in the meantime there is the body, the horrible meaty fact of it, the thing that reminds everyone, even people who didn’t care for the dead woman, and there are always a few of those, that one day they shall lie there too, just like her, emptied out of everything, merely a form, unable even to look at itself. And the mind recoils from its absence, cannot think of itself not thinking, the coldest of voids.

For there is nothing unusual or remarkable about the Swart family, oh no, they resemble the family from the next farm and the one beyond that, just an ordinary bunch of white South Africans, and if you don’t believe it then listen to us speak. We sound no different from the other voices, we sound the same and we tell the same stories, in an accent squashed underfoot, all the consonants decapitated and the vowels stove in. Something rusted and rain-stained and dented in the soul, and it comes through in the voice.

Thoughts

Another book dealing with the vestiges of empire, and what promises we keep to those who are ground up in its gears. We can look forward, and say we can’t keep any promises because the system prohibits us, like the remaining Swarts before the end of Apartheid, or continue looking forward when Apartheid ends and they still haven’t fulfilled their promise to Salome, relegating those injustices in the past and claiming they no longer need redress.

I think about a Supreme Court decision that just came down essentially eliminating the inclusion of race for college admissions. And I think about what promise America owes it’s black citizens, what redress for years of enslavement, then years more in subjugation as second-class citizens. Does this promise patronize those it benefits, like Salome seems to think? Is it too little, too late? Is there no mending this wound?

Galgut’s prose is something quite nice. He is a steady hand at the till. He reminds me of Ian McKewan – taking a family drama and transposing it to a national stage. The novel’s plot reminds me of the Banshees of Inisherin as well, which takes a friendship turned contentious feud of two friends to tell the story of the Irish civil war, in all it’s senselessness. The Swart family drama is a familial retelling of the history of South Africa immediately preceding and following Apartheid.

I’m not sure I buy the quote on the book slip that claims it the most important book of the last ten years (surely there are books on science that precipitate more change?) but it is a good book, nonetheless.