The Promise under Siege

 'The Promise' is the only work of Damon Galgut I have read among his nine works. Certain books I have read, were not read in the first read, so to say. They go through false starts. This shaky start has nothing to do with the quality of the work. It could be many things. Perhaps the moment or the mood.  Or attention and time being driven in other directions, though not always in more urgent or important directions. This is why the first forty pages of this book I have read thrice. It was like a promise I have made to myself that I will be back. I was. The Promise is worth the (repeated) read.

Damon Galgut's 2021 Booker Prize winning work 'The Promise' has its plot moving around a family in South Africa living its life while the country transforms itself. Amor, Astrid and Anton, three young members of the family lose their mother when the novel opens. When the novel closes, the rest of them all are gone, including their father, leaving Amor behind. Amor, the daughter, disowns the claim on the farm, leaving it, or what remains of it, to the widow of Anton, her brother, and moves on. The plot line of the work may often be summarised revolving around Amor's insistent efforts to realise the promise her father made while her mother was on her deathbed that the house and plot on which Salome, their maid was living, will be given to her, formally. Salome is as old as the home and the land. She deserved it, and more. Amor, in her characteristically quiet way pushes ahead with her single-point agenda, even though her father, then her brother, sister Astrid- all were not really in favor of it. If that promise is realised at the end, it is because Amor decides to let go of her claim on the land.

The novel is a good, disturbing read thanks not to the promise met at the end. It is not a work which builds up in that fashion too. Rather it is like the end came in its stride. Amor, though central to the book, is not assigned any chapter / part with her name. But she is the one the book opens with and she works her quiet presence / absence powerfully. The one who was struck by lightning while a child, Amor carries not just the scar and absent finger from the past experience, she, they say, has been strange and hard to fathom. The strangeness didnt confine to happenings like her running away while her mom's dead body was waiting to be taken for burial. She disconnects from the worldly, material pursuits and serves the poor, for instance, as a nurse in HIV wards. No one knows much about her whereabouts and is hard to be connected too. Soft spoken, honest, factual, taciturn, Amor's is ironically the power of the unburdened. The image of Amor on top of the house, topless, up there to disperse the ashes of Anton, but remaining there for a while like lost to the bearable lightness of life, is endearingly disturbing.

The other characters in the novel are sharply drawn: their father who dies bitten while experimenting with staying with poisonous snakes,  mother who reverts to Jewism after her husband bares it all, women and all, to his wife, Astrid chronically aware of her looks and others wealth, the representatives of the clergy class with spiritual and material manifestations. Salome, the maid who was key in bringing them all up, the usual coloured Ma who brings forth white kids, is epochal. Amor is the only one seen holding hands or hugging her, while the rest are grown up and wise!

The capacity of the author for irony/satire in the subtlest of ways is evident right through. There are times when satire screeches and times when irony hisses. It is worrying too as we know the target and logic of the humour. The ease with which the author draws out disturbingly light hearted, barbed tropes and the way he sculpts his lines, while authorially sinking into the characters psyche or while analysing their thoughts / actions is amazing. The saga of the Swart family and the farm is explored with a rare finesse in The Promise without letting the reader lose its political relevance.  The novel makes a nuanced show of the troubling underbelly of a nation in transition, but at the same time giving us a work that re-explores the elemental polarities and dilemmas. 

Dr. Babu. P. K 

Principal, Al Shifa College of Arts and Science, Kizhattoor, Perinthalmanna