The reader who wants to find a moral accounting for the original sin of racial oppression, as they might in a Faulkner novel, can find it with little effort – perhaps in the freshly butchered lamb the newly widowed Manie serves barbecued to his guests: not just hospitality but a product of ‘the need to slaughter some living thing’.

There are three Swart children, Anton, who is doing his military service Astrid, nearly grown up and newly aware of her sexual allure and 13-year-old Amor, who actually hears the promise being made and considers its fulfilment to be an imperative. Readers outside South Africa are unlikely to realise, until told so later, that under the legal system in force at the beginning of the book it wasn’t possible for Salome to own the house, something that seems to undermine the sincerity of Rachel’s gesture. Manie, the widower, preoccupied with complications such as Rachel’s return to her Jewish faith in her illness (this means the funeral arrangements are out of his hands), doesn’t keep his promise. Will the white family recognise its responsibility towards the black servant, in a novel set in the years either side of the dismantling of apartheid, the dramatic period when Nelson Mandela went ‘from a cell to a throne’? A clash of values and generations is set up. In 1986 Rachel Swart, on her deathbed, makes her husband promise to give Salome, the black servant who has nursed her through her illness, the house in which she lives on the Swart property. The narrative framework of The Promise is almost retro in its sturdiness. Plus one or two other incidents, a storeroom broken into one night, strangers having a prayer meeting on the koppie.’ There are changes in the city, too, with metal detectors at the mall, and the hopeful and welcoming light above the priest’s front door contradicted by the security gate and electric fence. A big land invasion out on the eastern side, closest to the township, fences cut and shacks put up, all in plain view. A farm that once had no need for security measures must now have its gate fastened with multiple locks. There’s certainly an element of chronicle in the book, a notation of changing circumstances and expectations, though it takes second place to family drama. (The last page might clinch it.) Twenty years later, Damon Galgut’s The Promise has followed this trajectory, with a Booker-shortlisted family narrative that’s also in two minds about its status as a document of historic social change. Coetzee’s Booker Prize-winning Disgrace, in which a narrative of disintegration and one of reconstruction were superimposed on each other, leaving it to the reader to decide which was the lower layer.

T he appetite for an authoritative portrait of the new South Africa was both catered to and resisted by J.M.

Reviews of the promise by damon galgut