The 2021 Booker Prize Winner

 The 2021 Booker Prize Winner is finally out in paperback, and I have been looking forward to reviewing it for you! First, however, a word from our sponsor, Leo Tolstoy: “All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” (Anna Karenina, 1878). This adage certainly applies to the Swart family. Can it also apply to countries?

Damon Galgut’s The Promise reifies the idea that “the third time's the charm.” This is the third time one of his novels has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and it is this nomination that has finally put him over the top and made him a winner. (Lamentations are offered for four-time nominee and zero-time winner Colm Toibin, who is consistently being mugged by the Booker judges.) Having not read the other novels on the shortlist, I am not in a position to say that this novel deserved it the most, but I can say that it is most certainly an appropriate addition to the pantheon of winners. (The Booker Prize has, for the last two decades, been one of the most solid book awards for novels written in English, so do not think that “appropriate” is some form of damnation through faint praise. When I say it deserves a spot in the Booker ranks, that is absolutely a compliment.) 

Yet, for all of the novel’s power and lyrical magic–Galgut’s prose flows with the liquid-like gentleness of good poetry–this is not a happy book. It is not intended to be, and I would never argue that there is no room for literature regarding sadness, pain, and loss; I would simply like to know, when I finish a book, that our shared journey through the heartache was leading to a destination that was worth the suffering along the way. I do not know that I feel that way about The Promise.

Well, without further ado, here we go: 

The Promise begins in 1987 in apartheid South Africa. Amor Swart’s mother, Rachel, exacts a promise from her husband on her deathbed: he must give their Black maid Salome the deed to the small house in which she lives. Why this is important to her is never explained, but Hermann (“Manie”) agrees, only to fail to live up to his promise. With the only witnesses to the promise being dead, Black, or Amor, the oft-neglected youngest child, it is an easy promise to ignore. Amor’s two siblings and the various aunts and uncles do not even believe Amor when she mentions the promise, and Salome is thus robbed of her inheritance. 

The rest of the novel is told through a series of time jumps, with family funerals serving as anchoring points by which the story continues. Over the course of thirty-one years, first Pa dies, then Amor’s sister Astrid, and finally her brother, Anton. Each subsequent funeral presents an opportunity, in Amor’s eyes, to set things right by giving Salome what she was promised, but her place of weakness and her geographic distance from the family robs her of any effective strength. I am a big believer in not spoiling a novel’s outcome, but I hope you will forgive me for telling you Salome does, eventually, get the deed to her home and the segment of land on which it sits. You need to know that because it acts as the ultimate climactic question of the novel, the question that gives the entire work its fundamental meaning: “What was the point of all of this?” 

If the point of the novel is to entertain, then it succeeds completely, but, still, what was the point of its narrative? What was the point of the fight to get Salome her home? What, ultimately, was the point of any of the lives that the members of the Swart family lived? Furthermore, there is a subtext to The Promise that seems to ask that same question– “What was the point of all of this?”--about South Africa itself. Each subsequent death after Rachel’s is tied to a historical event of some kind, but just as the passage of time diminishes the Swart family, Galgut tells an underlying story of how time has not been kind to South Africa, either. The reader sees the hope of the post-apartheid period fade away in a continual, erosive process of corrupt politicking, social disorder, and even climactic change. (Anton dies in 2018, just as Cape Town–where Amor lives–comes perilously close to running out of potable water.) This does not mean that members of the Swart family do not try to convince themselves that things have improved: Salome's greater physical and spatial presence at each subsequent funeral is used as a sort of proof that racial harmony is progressing successfully in South Africa, for all that the family still refuses to give the loyal maid the rights to her home. Each funeral further reveals a greater decay of the basic family unit, and the laying to rest of each Swart displays an escalation of misery, anger, and spiritual degradation as the dysfunctional family falls to in-fighting every single time they are in the same room.

Amor experiences her first period during her mother’s funeral, and ultimately enters menopause during her brother’s. The hope that Salome felt when the promise was exacted takes 31 years, the entire course of Amor’s childbearing life, to come to a fruition that ultimately seems to lack substance. While I would never suggest that having children is necessary to live a good life, the fact that Amor, the last of the Swarts, never has any is part of the failure of the family itself. Her “exemption” from motherhood dooms the family to extinction, and her status as the "Last Swart" is a pyrrhic victory in every way.

However good The Promise is, and believe me, it is more than just “good,” I find myself struggling for a surety of meaning. Can a narrative be just that–a summation of events that ultimately have no meaning? In a sense, I think the novel proves that, yes, indeed, such a narrative is possible because, tragically, that is the very nature of the Swart family’s lives. They are “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” (Macbeth, 1623), and so too, I think Galgut says, could be South Africa itself. It is a pretty strong argument to make, and while I am convinced of the symbolism, I am not sure of it. Surety comes only from speaking directly to the author himself.

That is the tricky thing about symbolism: you can think you know a thing, but that does not mean you actually know that thing. So, I recommend (request) that you read the latest Booker Award-winning novel, and try to answer that question for yourself. I look forward to hearing what you take from this incredible yet terrifying family history. Any thoughts--or disagreements--are heartily welcomed in the comments section below.