The Promise

The Swarts are a white South African family on a farm outside Pretoria, and the novel visits them four times across four decades, each time for a funeral. At the first, in 1986, Rachel Swart dies and her youngest daughter Amor, thirteen years old, overhears her mother extracting a promise from her father: that Salome, the Black woman who has worked for the family and nursed Rachel through her illness, will be given the house she already lives in. Nothing is done. The promise sits unhonoured through the years that follow, through the end of apartheid and the Mandela presidency and the disappointments after it, while the family diminishes and quarrels and dies off one by one, and Amor keeps returning to ask. Galgut's narrator is a restless, unstable presence, sliding between minds mid-sentence, breaking off to comment, drifting from a dying man into the thoughts of a nurse or a passing dog. The technique keeps the reader at an ironic distance from people who cannot see themselves at all. It is a short book covering forty years, and its central point is made by omission: Salome is the one character the narration never fully enters, which is precisely the argument.