The Promise is an overwrought story of one South African family’s disintegration, told through the lens of four different funerals. The Swarts are a family of five, or maybe four, depending on how we count, because the book opens at the funeral of Rachel, the matriarch. Then there’s Manie, the patriarch; the youngest daughter Amor; middle child Astrid; and oldest son-slash-ne’er-do-well Anton. Whatever tied them together at the book’s opening, things quickly fall apart, so that as the novel closes it’s just barely possible to get a hold of Amor.

The novel interweaves South African history, starting in the latter days of the apartheid regime, winding through Mandela’s presidency, and then the scandals that followed after. The style is overbearing to the point of hostile, sentences that run on for pages and switch perspective three or four times before arriving at their point. There is something impressive, even artistic, in it, but that’s not to say it’s enjoyable. Galgut seems to be reaching for a form of art that embodies the suffering of so many during all of this turmoil. I can sort of see why this book won the Booker Prize, though I find the other Bookers I’ve read to be so much more worthwhile. Far be it for me, a foreigner with no direct experience, to say - but he seems to fall short of his artistic goal.

As a mathematical matter, he seems to give equal if not greater narrative weight to the post-apartheid coruption scandals than to the evil of apartheid itself. To me it seems like a privileged kind of narrative structure, as though the end of the apartheid regime wasn’t quite worth it because some of the leaders that followed were corrupt. The voices of the oppressed are curiously absent from this work, save a line or two from Lukas toward the end, a reassuring hug from a nearly-silenced Salome, etc. It is easy to think that the novel suffers from a kind of social blindness, though I know little enough as to say it’s just an impression.

As a thematic matter, the book is clearly attempting to balance a diversity of religious practices: Jewish, Dutch Reform, Catholic, and voodoo. That is kind of interesting but it also seems to fall short. What is the promise that this book alludes to? It can only be the promse that Rachel extracts from Manie as she is dying, that he will give part of the farm to Salome, the black woman who has kept house and watched children for the Swarts over the course of decades. There is the whiff of the biblical in this promise to return a homeland to its rightful owner. It is, after all, demanded by a woman whose name matches that of the Jewish matriarch on behalf of another woman whose name means peace. But it all falls short somehow, the biblical allusions don’t really tie together, the promise is not really fulfilled. Even the ending of the story, which for a minute or two seemed to complete some kind of grand biblical arc, some kind of divine retribution finally made whole - no, that falls short too, in rather disappointing fashion.

It is perhaps the point that Galgut is making, that South African history is full of promise that does not quite pan out, that it has somehow missed the touch of the divine. But the narrative is unbalanced and there is something unsatisfying - about the plot, about the structure, and certainly about the style. It does not seem that Galgut has quite captured the story of South Africa, or even the story of its promise. Then again, what do I know?