![]() The novel is cleverly structured in four parts, each part based around a different funeral, which enables the narrative to leave the main characters frozen at one snapshot moment in time, before cutting forward chronologically to the next significant point of crisis and connection. ![]() The narrative follows this wealthy, property- and land-rich white South African family and their declining fortunes over a period of about 30 years, covering the time immediately before and the decades immediately following the collapse of apartheid. ![]() And in the background is the quiet presence of Salome, the family’s black domestic servant, and an unfulfilled promise, made at Ma’s deathbed, of the right to her own home, her own property. All of these people are complex and flawed to a greater or lesser degree, but all feel like fully rounded, real people. ![]() The book opens with the untimely death from cancer of Ma, 40-year-old Rachel, who leaves a husband, two adolescent daughters – inscrutable Amor and flighty Astrid – and a slightly older son, the impulsive and sensitive Anton (my favourite). The book rises way beyond the banal expectations that those two words might conjure up. Damon Galgut’s outstanding 2021 novel The Promise was, for me, a worthy winner of the Booker prize, and is definitely one of my top reads of 2021, though to describe the book as a ‘family saga’ – as many reviews have done – is reductive. ![]()
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