The Promise arrives at a time when the farm novel, having moved from pastoral epic to family tragedy, teeters on the brink of farce. And yet, in these two novels, the farm still acts as a site of generative connection between people broken by South Africa. In the first decades after the end of apartheid, the farm novel underwent perhaps its greatest upheaval as J.M Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) and Marlene van Niekerk’s Agaat (2004) fundamentally unsettled the genre’s governing motif of domestication, challenging in the process the idea that human nature and action could be contained by the pastoral mode. Here on this solitary koppie, as an early review of Schreiner noted, ‘there come up for solution one after another the simple questions of human nature and human action’. The tradition encompasses the idealised plaasroman of Afrikaans alongside antipastoral novels like Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883). Yet it remains at the centre of The Promise, with Galgut offering this place of diminishing worth as a sardonic addendum to the tradition of the farm novel, so long a staple of white South African literature. The farm itself is a bit of a joke too: ‘one horse and a few cows’. It scorched her feet and felled a toe, an absence that ties her to the farm by cosmic joke.

As a child, she was struck by lightning while out on a koppie, an outcrop on the flat dry veld. Her family is unnerved by her strangeness. The only one committed to upholding Rachel’s wish is her youngest daughter, Amor, who witnessed the deathbed bequest unnoticed: ‘They didn’t see me, I was like a black woman to them.’Īmor’s disempowerment, like Salome’s, allows her behind closed doors, but never comfortably. For hers is not a demand for upheaval – John the Baptist’s head – but a disquieting pull towards the promise of her own place a promise that is cast aside at every opportunity by Manie and two of his children. Like Maria in Damon Galgut’s The Good Doctor (2003), the name Salome is burdened by the misplaced weight of Western culture.

It is 1986 in South Africa, and already the idea of giving Salome the land on which she lives can’t help but invoke the paranoid spectre of widescale repatriation. Salome has cared for her, has mopped up ‘blood and shit and pus and piss’, doing the jobs Rachel’s family found ‘too dirty or too intimate’. Rachel Swart is in the final decline of a terminal cancer when she extracts a promise from her husband, Manie: he agrees to give their maid Salome the deed to the Lombard Place, a small house on the family’s farm.

Synopsis of the promise damon galgut