Damon Galgut is looking shell-shocked. “I’m slightly worried,” he confesses. “Well, more than slightly, to be honest.” And it’s not just because he’s still in the Groucho Club at 11 in the morning after winning the Booker prize the night before. He’s concerned that now people will start focusing less on his writing and more on him as a personality, which is a terrifying thought for this quiet, yoga-loving 57-year-old whose idea of a good time is a quiet read or a hike up Table Mountain, near his Cape Town home.
When we meet, he’s “gritty eyed” after a night doing the rounds of publishers’ parties in Soho. Even before Covid, crowded rooms and schmoozing were not really his scene, he confides, but with the new global acclaim a prize such as the Booker brings, he’s going to have to get used to it. “There’s a frenzy surrounding the Booker that doesn’t seem to attach to any other literary prize. It’s one that all writers secretly aspire to. But I’m far more comfortable with the attention being on the book rather than me.”
Having made the shortlist twice before, for The Good Doctor in 2003 and In a Strange Room in 2010, he was, he says, “much more used to almost winning, but not quite getting there, and that felt like my natural groove. So last night really did take me by surprise. I always find reasons why things are not going to come to me, so it was a big shock.” And his anxiety over this year’s prize was made worse because everyone in the publishing world was certain he would finally win this time. Their confidence, he says, “felt like the kiss of death. If everyone’s sure of something it hardly ever works out.”
These Eeyorisms will be expected and even relished by fans of his dark, elegantly moody stories. Yet The Promise, about a dysfunctional white family fighting over a piece of land in South Africa, surprised readers — and judges — by being laugh-out-loud funny. Although grim in subject matter, being structured around four funerals, at times it reads like Succession (of which Galgut is a fan) narrated by Larry David.
Yet at heart it’s a story about the injustice still rife in Galgut’s native South Africa. The symbol for his country’s slow-healing wounds is Salome, the black servant of the graceless Swart family. Through decades of births and deaths she is a constant, nurturing presence — however, we barely hear her speak. Did he recoil from ventriloquising a black person because of identity politics? “I can really say, with a sincere heart, that that’s not the case. I strongly defend the right of any writer to make an imaginative leap into being somebody else. That’s the whole premise of fiction.”
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However, he made a deliberate choice to withhold that imaginative leap in the case of Salome. “I wanted to draw attention to the fact that the white characters around her don’t perceive her in any meaningful way. Which is true of the white South Africa I grew up in and the new South Africa right now. That hasn’t changed. There is a growing black middle-class in South Africa and a new wealthy black elite and of course those people correspondingly have a voice which is used to re-brand the image of the country.
“But at the heart of our current problems is the fact that life is not transformed in the way that it should have since 1994. Nowhere is that crystallised more concretely than in a person like Salome: an uneducated rural black woman who, since I was born, has always been at the bottom of the pyramid and apparently is still there with no voice at all. So I hoped that giving her no voice in the book, but making it a problem for the reader, would amplify her silence and hopefully disturb the reader into wondering why such a person isn’t being heard.”
Disturbing the reader is his stock-in-trade, after all, and he confesses to preferring “books that don’t resolve matters — that leave the reader with a problem to work out. That seems more true to how actual life works.”
One of the most unsettling aspects of The Promise is the way that the home, usually a byword for safety, becomes volatile and dangerous as the greedy, reactionary Swarts stir up trouble. This reflects the changing perception of home felt by Galgut. “As a kid you grow up with a sense of security and protection in your home. That’s what home means. But in South Africa it’s very hard to maintain that because your home is an ever insecure thing, especially if it’s been built on taking things from other people.”
Childhood lymphoma nearly killed him — you might hope that Galgut was afforded an easy path to adulthood, but in conservative Pretoria during the State of Emergency in the 1980s, where apartheid was underpinned by a strong Calvinist morality, no such fate was available to an intelligent, young gay man (it’s no wonder he doesn’t believe in stories that neatly dispense justice).
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“I did military conscription. Two years in the air force. It was horrible. I never think about that time — I’ve repressed it. But I do remember we were subjected to political briefings that were delivered by religious ministers. ‘This was a God-given right! White people were superior because God wanted it that way! If South Africa fell, godless communism was going to take over the world!’ All of this was being marshalled as a defence of our bizarre way of living. I remember listening to one of these ministers telling us that this was a holy war that we were involved in and disagreeing intensely about that, but being afraid to say so, especially in a military context where consequences could be severe.”
Nor was the cruelty restricted to army life. “It was of a piece with my upbringing in Pretoria. I had an Afrikaans stepfather who was violent and conservative, so the atmosphere at home embodied exactly the same angry, physically abusive atmosphere.”
In his twenties, things began to change. But only so much. “When I went to university, I came to full political consciousness. It was the first time I took part in protests where the police came and beat white kids as opposed to black protesters. I remember a protest at the University of Cape Town where I got hit. I remember having an argument with my grandfather at the dinner table about that protest. I told him what had happened — how the police had behaved. I told him what they did and he, a judge in high apartheid time, just said ‘Rubbish. That’s not true.’ In other words, what I’d seen and heard, I hadn’t seen and heard. So that was a moment of truth.”
As he speaks about these events, Galgut’s sweetly bookish, benevolent and steady demeanour never falters, and you sense that his long writing career (his first novel was published in 1982 when he was 17) has been a therapeutic balm and a buffer, allowing him to hold life’s unpleasantness at a distance. He agrees that with the puckish, postmodern narrative voice he found for The Promise, its artificiality and instability “opened up some space between me and the heavy, dark terror of funerals and dying and allowed an antidote to the poison of decay”.
This remarkable man, talking softly and generously to me against a backdrop of silly Soho chatter, makes even words such as “the poison of decay” sound warm and comforting. And that is the secret of his literary success, recognised at last by the Booker’s judging panel: he makes beautiful art from horrible things, and that rare talent embodies a message of hope that has the power to radiate from deepest South Africa to the rest of this troubled world. Even as far as a gritty-eyed morning-after at the Groucho.
