Books & Culture

Damon Galgut’s Booker-winning novel charts the cruel legacy of South African apartheid in a bold, cinematic style

by MIRANDA FRANCE

There are many things to admire in Damon Galgut’s novel, The Promise, winner of this year’s Booker Prize, among them its economy, its humour and its indictment of brutality both personal and political. The novel’s most extraordinary quality, though, is the way it moves. The narrative voice seems to spin, to flow, to wheel like a snitch from a Harry Potter book through the pages. The reader is propelled forward, zipping from one character to another, through rooms, down corridors, pausing to consider a ringing telephone, then whisked up into the sky for an aerial view of a garden reception: “Hats and hairdos and bald spots, in aimless circulation.”

All novelists have to work out ways to link their scenes and characters, most opting for a range of more or less conventional solutions. To create such an intricate choreography as Galgut has, then make your story work with it, is hugely impressive. The style here has echoes of modernism—broken sentences recalling the musings of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, or Septimus Smith in Mrs Dalloway—but more than anything it’s like camerawork. Each of the novel’s four sections reads as one long unbroken take, a panning shot with characters sliding in from left and right.

Take Lindile, the carjacker who slides into a BMW at a set of traffic lights in the third part. Everything moves, even the unravelling thread on a character’s jumper or the smoke from a cigarette “scribbling across the windscreen.” The characters themselves pass the story like a baton. At one moment we’re in the mind of Father Batty, a Catholic priest, then of Bob, the homeless man he sees outside the church. Bob carries us up the street past a therapist’s office and leaves us in her mind, then we hop over to her client— who turns out to be a character that we already know, and so the story continues. It comes as no surprise to learn that Galgut was working on film scripts before he started The Promise and chose the camera’s “eye” to guide his approach. It’s left to one of the minor characters to articulate the novel’s rationale. “One thing conjures up another. All events joined somehow, at least in memory.”