The Promise

Galgut could have inserted page breaks to indicate the reader can mentally pause, such as between days or between major events, but he did not. How would the experience of reading the novel be different if Galgut inserted page or chapter breaks? Why do you think he chose not to do so?

In some moments, the novel’s narrative voice sounds like a chorus with a deep knowledge of the Swarts’ hometown. For instance, in Part 1, the narrative voice says, “So the only people who were with Rachel Swart when her time came were her husband, aka Pa or Manie, and the black girl, what’s her name again, Salome, who obviously doesn’t count” (35). Who or what are those moments are meant to evoke? Local elders? God? Galgut? Someone else?

Galgut shows the inner lives of many minor characters in the text, revealing them in an unflattering light. Think, for instance, of Father Batty’s impatience with Jake’s existential crisis, Dr. Raaff’s unexplained thoughts that the narrator warns would disturb his patients if they were widely known, or Vernon Winkler’s connection between dead bodies and his attraction to Amor. What do these characterizations and depictions suggest about humanity and human nature? For example, is the narrative suggesting that everyone’s inner life would be troubling if other people could see it, or is there some shared quality among these people that Galgut wants to expose as particularly troubling?

There are many moments when Galgut highlights the novel’s fictionality. How did these moments affect your reading? Did they take you out of the story and make it less impactful, or did they make the reading experience richer and more complex? Why?

At the end of the novel, there are no children with the name “Swart” left to take over the farm, but Astrid’s twins, Neil and Jessica, are still living. Does the novel give any reason to hope they will have a bright future? Why or why not?

After Amor gives Salome ownership of her house and access to her inheritance payments, she gets caught in a rainstorm. The narrator comments, “Yes, here it comes, the rain, like some cheap redemptive symbol in a story.” Do you think that the novel’s concluding events justify hope that this could be a “redemptive rain” symbolizing real change, or does the narrator’s meta-commentary about rain as a symbol undermine that possibility? Consider the narrator’s habit of drawing attention to fictional conventions in your answer.

At the end of the novel, Salome might get her house only to have it taken away eventually by a competing land claim; the South African government is trying to address generational inequality by allowing people who had land stolen from them to petition for its return. Is this system of land claim petitions a just form of restitution for apartheid? Is it a good if imperfect system, or is there some alternate system that would be better? If so, what might an alternate system look like?

Early in the book, challenges to racial equality exist very directly in the form of apartheid. At the end, challenges to racial equality still exist but are less blatant. What kind of inequities do you see South Africa still needing to deal with by the novel’s end?