The Promise by Damon Galgut

 

A few years ago we were invited to visit some people at their home in Pretoria, South Africa; their domestic staff lived in a little concrete house on the property and I pictured this place as I was reading The Promise. 

Thirteen year old Amor, the youngest of the three children of Manie and Rachel Swart, overhears her dying mother ask her father to promise to give to Salome, their maid, the house she lives in and the ground surrounding it. Salome has nursed Rachel through her illness and always cared for the family and Rachel wants her to be thanked and rewarded appropriately. Manie agrees and Rachel dies two weeks later.This then is the story of whether that promise is ever kept.

This is such a good book! The three children, Anton, Astrid and Amor, are all very different and their stories are told separately. The story spans the last years of the apartheid era to the present and touches incidentally on the fate of South Africa through its presidents from the glory days of Nelson Mandela and the famous World Cup to the big spending Thabo Mbeki (citing the fabulous and important O R Tambo airport) to the corruption of the Zuma administration: “The President’s friends have run off with the cash. No lights, no water, lean times in the land of plenty.”.  A white child learns of the role her father played under apartheid through the Truth and Reconciliation hearings and a black child comes to the full realisation of what equality is supposed to mean.

The characterisations of Anton, Astrid and Amor are deep and sensitive and real and they will stay with me. When I started reading the book I didn’t think it was going to engage me because it is written without any quotation marks and is all in the present tense; however, this very soon began to feel natural and easy to read and if I had given up after the first few pages I would have missed out on a beautiful, meaningful experience. I hadn’t heard of Damon Galgut before this and I will look for his previous books now.

This books rates 5 out of 5 on all levels.

Published by Vintage