The Promise

A white family on a farm outside Pretoria loses its mother, and at the deathbed the youngest child overhears a promise. Rachel Swart has asked her husband to give Salome, the Black woman who has cared for the family and nursed her through her dying, the house she already lives in. He agrees. Then she dies, and the promise is left where it fell.

The novel visits the Swarts four times across more than thirty years, once at each funeral, as the family shrinks and the country changes around it from the last years of apartheid to the Zuma presidency. Amor, who overheard, keeps asking. Her brother Anton and sister Astrid have their own reasons for not hearing the question. The house is never quite handed over, and the reasons it is never quite handed over are the book.

Galgut writes it in a restless third person that slides between characters mid paragraph, wanders off to follow a stranger, and occasionally addresses you directly. It sounds like it should be irritating and instead it is exhilarating, moving fast and seeing everything, including the things the Swarts have arranged not to see. Salome is given very little space on the page, which is not an oversight but the point being made in the form itself.

It is short, funny in a bleak way, and much easier to read than its reputation for formal difficulty suggests. The roving narrator does the work that exposition would otherwise demand, so the decades pass without a single laboured summary of what has changed. Start it and you will likely finish it in two sittings.