Though the plot of the novel is eventful enough and engaging, the real star is Galgut’s style. It presents history in the way that the people on the wrong side of it would experience it – the family mostly looks at the changes taking over the country with distaste and impatience. So The Promise folds apartheid into the story from a very specific point of view and in no way pretends to present a comprehensive account of it. I think this is very clever of Galgut it would be very difficult to handle the novel otherwise because the family dynamics would likely fade into thin air against something so momentous for the country and for much of the world. It permeates everything but doesn’t fully materialised into view. In The Promise, apartheid is like a play where the set is made up of shadows and smoke. What Amor doesn’t realise at the time is that Salome would not have been able to own property even if her father had kept his promise. Amor is the only witness to this and her father denies ever making the promise. Amor, the youngest daughter, overhears a promise her father makes to her mother: he will give their faithful housekeeper Salome (a Black woman) a small house that is located on the family’s farm. Three children and a father are left behind when the matriarch of the family dies at the age of 40 at the start of the novel. The Promise follows a white South African family through decades of loss and disappointment.
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