It started one semi-drunken afternoon listening to funeral anecdotes. It ended with the Booker prize.
Damon Galgut won English literature’s most coveted fiction prize last night with his ninth novel, The Promise. It is third time lucky for the 57-year-old South African, who was shortlisted for the prize in 2003 and 2010.
He is the first South African to win the prize since JM Coetzee in 1999.
Galgut said the inspiration for The Promise — a family saga centring on a farm near Pretoria and which chronicles South Africa’s transition from apartheid to multi-party democracy — came after a “semi-drunken” lunch with a friend who regaled him with a series of funeral anecdotes.
“I wasn’t doing literary research,” he joked last night. “I was just having a good lunch and he was making me laugh.” He said it was afterwards that the thought of using funerals as a “small window” into a family story seeped into his brain and “turned into a narrative”.
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Galgut, who has spoken previously of how “problematic” literary prizes are and bemoaned the particular “frenzy” surrounding the Booker Prize, admitted last night he was worried about the impact winning would have on his work.
“Most writers require solitude, many hours of it to work properly,” he said. “Even the relatively limited amount of attention that has come to me in recent years has eaten into that so I have only a dim sense of what winning this prize might mean for my future. So it is my concern.”
He has said that his two previous shortlistings with their accompanying attention had “probably shaved a few years off my life”.
The novel focuses on the Swart family who Galgut has described as a “mix of English and Afrikaans and a hodge-podge of creeds and beliefs too” and is structured around four funerals that take place in different decades with different presidents in power.
Maya Jasanoff, the chairwoman of the judging panel, which also included Lord Williams of Oystermouth, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, and the actress Natascha McElhone, said they had had a “long and convivial” discussion yesterday before “collectively” awarding the prize to Galgut.
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The judges had started with 158 submitted entries before choosing a 13-strong longlist, which they then whittled down to a shortlist of six. It means the final six should have been read three times by each of the judges. The other writers on the shortlist were the Americans Patricia Lockwood, Richard Powers and Maggie Shipstead, along with the Briton Nadifa Mohamed and the Sri Lankan Anuk Arudpragasam.
Jasanoff, an American professor of history, said that Galgut’s “tour de force” had “revealed something new” with each reading. She said that Galgut’s examination of families and their dysfunctions reminded the judges of William Faulkner while his “deft inhabiting of different characters’ consciousness evokes Virginia Woolf”.
Galgut, who has said he decided to become a writer after developing lymphoma as a child, has acknowledged a debt to Faulkner and Woolf, as well as to Patrick White and Samuel Beckett. He has also — in common with Douglas Stuart, who won last year’s Booker prize with his debut novel Shuggie Bain — pinpointed James Kelman’s 1994 winner How Late It Was, How Late as his favourite previous winner of the prize.
Also in common with Stuart, and unusually for the prize historically, Galgut’s book had been the bookmakers’ strong favourite to win the prize. He is also, like Stuart, gay.
His frontrunner position, following a series of adulatory reviews of the book, was entrenched after the heavyweight British authors Sir Kazuo Ishiguro and Francis Spufford were excluded from the shortlist. As this year’s winner of the prize, which is sponsored by the Crankstart charity, Galgut receives £50,000 plus the £2,500 given to each shortlisted author. He can also expect a surge in sales.
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A novel that is full of ideas . . . and not afraid of soap opera
There are years when you suspect that the Booker prize judges are in the pay of sinister forces hellbent on discrediting literary fiction (Robbie Millen writes). Not this year.
From an underwhelming shortlist, the five judges selected the strongest novel. Though it lacks the popular reach of Shuggie Bain, last year’s winner, The Promise by Damon Galgut is cleverly constructed and full of ideas.
John Self said in his review for The Times: “This is so obviously one of the best novels of the year.” Fiction at its best gives you a chance to wander around the heads of other humans, to see what makes people tick. The Promise certainly does that. It follows the fortunes of the Swarts, “an ordinary bunch of white South Africans”, from 1986, the dying days of apartheid, to the tricky new uncertainties of 2018.
As Galgut, who was born in South Africa, says: “The Swart family is a kind of amalgamation of everything I grew up with in Pretoria.”
The strength of the novel is how Galgut inhabits his characters. His narrator swoops in and out of the consciousness of each of his creations, jumping quickly from viewpoint to viewpoint.
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That could have been disorienting but Galgut, who was nominated twice before for the prize, does it with skill. Though there is not much to be said in favour of the Swarts, by the end we know them inside out, delusions and all.
The story is told in four parts. Each new chapter, set roughly a decade apart, revolves around the death of a family member. Time, we discover, is not a healer for this family.
Galgut is not afraid of a dash of soap opera to keep the reader involved. We encounter alcoholism, PTSD, low sperm counts, a shooting, a carjacking, secrets, rivalries and estrangements amid the failing family business, a reptile resort called Scaly City.
It’s no plot spoiler to say that despite moments of comedy Galgut’s tone is pessimistic.
Robbie Millen is literary editor of The Times
