The loner who pricked a nation’s conscience

The Booker Prize has had a tumultuous few years. There was a run of picking winners such as Anna Burns’s Milkman and George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo which, while being technically highly accomplished, were not obvious crowd pleasers. In 2019 it lost the plot entirely, handing the prize not to one novelist but two, and in doing so breaking its own rules. But now it’s back on terra firma. Having been shortlisted twice before, for The Good Doctor in 2003, and In A Strange Room in 2010, the South African author Damon Galgut was this year, from the start, the clear favourite to win with his kaleidoscopic family saga The Promise – and he did..Except he’s not unequivocally happy about it. "There is a safety in not winning," he says wryly, sitting at a table in London’s Groucho Club, the remnants of a hastily eaten omelette before him. "Being on the shortlist you are noticed but not too much; it suited my temperament quite well. I know some novelists flourish under attention, but it doesn’t come easily to me.".He’d better get used to it. Ever since his name was announced, Galgut has been fielding constant requests from the media. Yet while The Promise has been described as the safe choice, it’s not a particularly safe novel to read. It’s written in four parts, each set in a different decade, and tells the story of the Afrikaner Swart family through the funerals of four of its members, beginning with that of the matriarch Rachel in 1986. It’s addressed in the present tense to an unnamed ‘you’, making, for the reader, the injustices of the story feel queasily alive..But what makes it a particularly intense reading experience is the way the narrative jumps about like a hyperactive, all-seeing fly, making mordantly funny asides on the action and darting in and out of the heads of a large cast of characters, sometimes mid-sentence.. While The Promise has been described as the safe choice, it’s not a particularly safe novel to read Image Credit: Supplied ."I know some readers like the reassurance of a single narrator, but one of the problems of narrating a country like South Africa is that there is no single voice that can speak for us," says the 57-year-old Galgut. "It’s a very discordant country, made up of multiple, contradictory voices. The traditional novel can sometimes aid the illusion that life is made up of good and bad people, and that bad situations can be resolved, but that doesn’t ring true to me.".The one character whose head we don’t enter is Salome, the family’s black maid. Rachel has made a deathbed promise to give her the house she lives in on the family farm just outside Pretoria, yet as the decades roll, the family fail to honour that pledge. Did he feel anxious as a white man writing from the perspective of a black character?."No, I want to say that emphatically, because there is a very strong strain of identity politics in South Africa that might say I have no right. [But] in the case of this book, I decided it would be more powerful to only penetrate the psyches of the black characters as far as the white counterparts are likely to perceive them, which is to say, not very far.".A disillusioned attachment.It is impossible to untangle Galgut from the convulsions of South African history, much as he might sometimes wish it. His career, which began in 1982 with his first novel A Sinless Season, runs almost parallel with the collapse of apartheid and the hope seeded under Mandela, which reached a symbolic moment of unity when the country’s first black head of state congratulated the victorious Springboks at the 1995 Rugby World Cup final in Johannesburg..What then follows is the entrenchment of disillusionment, even despair under Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma. His nine works of fiction are filled with characters haunted by a history of violence and complicity. Early on in The Promise, the 13-year-old Amor has an exchange in which she grasps, for the first time, the ingrained moral hypocrisy of her home country. ‘Without even knowing it herself, she begins to understand what country she’s living in,’ writes Galgut. Did he have a similar epiphany?."If you grew up in the 60s and 70s as I did, you grew up in an inverted world that was presented to you as normal. We were taught that apartheid was a moral truth that the rest of the world didn’t understand. But, of course, reality is constantly going against the grain of that. You see terrible things: passbooks, poverty, indifference to suffering. But it wasn’t until my 20s, when at university, that I jettisoned all the truths that had been taught to me and began to understand South Africa in a totally different way.."It’s become enormously complicated of course, because the moral credentials of the ANC are very tarnished. It’s easy to feel a moral exhaustion about South Africa now.".Galgut chooses his words very carefully. He is charming company and dryly funny, but he also betrays a hint of deep inner melancholy. He lives in Cape Town and describes himself as a natural loner. At the age of six, he contracted cancer, and thus was used to spending time away from his peers.."It gave me a strong sense of being different to other kids. You are not meant to be aware of your own mortality at that age. I felt marked by it, and actually a little bit ashamed. But it gave me a love of stories so it’s very bound up with me wanting to be a writer.".He has never considered himself particularly politically driven. Yet one of the singular distinctions of the South African psyche is that it’s impossible not to be. ‘I would love to write a cosy crime caper, for example, but what South African story would authentically fit that bill?’ he says with a small laugh. "I tried once to write a different sort of novel with In A Strange Room [his formally astonishing, semi-autobiographical, existential crisis novel] but for that I had to leave the country. And in fact no one in South Africa wanted to publish that book, it was considered too strange. But my point is: the moment you settle in a particular place in South Africa, the past is always there.".Then there is the complicating privilege of being white. "Of course. I was born into privilege. You can’t help who you are born. I tried to give a voice to this in The Promise through Amor, who is uncomfortable with the power she’s just naturally been given, but [surrendering] these things isn’t so straight forward. There’s no cloak room where you can go and hand them in. Amor’s solution is to renounce her family and devote her life to working in a hospital. But while that might ease her discomfort, it’s not necessarily a solution for the country.."With every book I’m trying to balance those things out. To keep humans and humanity at the forefront, but also, you know, not to take my eye off history in the background, because we exist in an uneasy relationship all the time.".The Daily Telegraph.Read more. Amitav Ghosh: ‘Young people understand climate crisis in a way my generation has failed to’ Shivesh Bhatia: From kitchen disasters to bestselling chef Skyfall: Saba Karim Khan invites readers to imagine a world ‘much like Abu Dhabi’