Virtual book launch: The Promise by Damon Galgut

good evening everyone and welcome to the launch of the promise by damon golgit my name is jennifer malek i'm the editor of the reading list and we're hosting this launch tonight along with penguin random house south africa and umuzi joining damon for the discussion this evening is mark capita mark is one of south africa's foremost writers his most recent book the pink line journeys across the world's queer frontiers was recently long listed for the 2021 sunday time cnn literary awards and was named one of the hundred must-read books of 2020 by time magazine mark writes frequently for the guardian the new york times granter and many other publications he lives in cape town damon golgoth is a novelist who has twice been shortlisted for the booker prize for the good doctor and in a strange room his novel arctic summer was nominated for the walter scott and folio prizes and his fiction has been published in 16 languages a film adaptation of his novel the quarry starring michael shannon was released in 2020 he lives and works in cape town as well the promise the novel we're celebrating this evening which i have here um charts the crash and burn of a white south african family living on a farm outside pretoria in this story of a diminished family sharp and tender emotional truths hit her confident deft and quietly powerful the promise is literally fiction at its at its finest the book has received some jaw-dropping amount of praise from some of the biggest names in literature and um if you go to the reading if you go to readinglist.click our website and search for the promise you'll see a story i put up a couple of weeks ago charting those um blurbs that that damon has received from honestly some some big names so it was quite um it was quite astonishing well i shouldn't say that though it's kind of you know it's it's deserved and expected but i mean it's just the list of people saying it's the best book they've ever read is quite something um the american novelist edmond white called it the most important book of the last 10 years um so yeah if you haven't got a copy for yourself yet this is what it looks like go to your nearest bookstore tomorrow good or bad and it'll be on the shelves and you can also order it online obviously if you're being careful on any of the um the sites that sell books you should be able to get a copy um please leave your questions about the book in the comment section wherever you're watching this video on facebook or on youtube and we'll have time to answer some of those questions during a q a at the end of the session so i'm sure damon will be glad to answer any questions you have about the book about writing about how you write you know during a pandemic or any of the pressing questions you have so yeah without further ado let me hand over to mark and enjoy the discussion thank you very much jennifer and welcome damon thanks mark thanks jennifer too it's it's uh wonderful being here talking to you about this book which is um quite frankly one of the most thrilling literary experiences i've had in a very long time um i've read it twice once in draft and and once between covers these very handsome covers and um it is quite remarkable in in the way um it hits on truths and on on political truths on emotional truths uh while also through through not while also but through a kind of experimental innovative style that um has deep deep roots in in modernist literature but at the same time is is is all of damon's own and all of this moments own and i think that's one of the triumphs of this book is is it's um is its genealogy and its uniqueness so congratulations tillman uh it's it's it's really wonderful to be with you um i'm going to begin with a a quotation a a a a citation by claire misood from her review in harper's magazine she wrote to praise this novel in its particulars for its seriousness for its balance of formal freedom and elegance for its humor its precision its human truth seems inadequate and powerful simply you must read it like other remarkable novels it is uniquely itself and greater than the sum of its parts so i thought let's let's begin damon by by talking about those parts and and sort of adding them up and perhaps you can tell us a little bit about about the structure of the book um what it concerns and how you came to the structure um as i'm sure you know mark i mean books arrive in unexpected ways i mean we're always as writers looking for the next project what might be interesting enough to occupy us for a few years um and i'm no different in that respect um this kind of germ of the book the very first journal of the book came to a conversation with a friend who is a bit older than me um and who is as it happens the last surviving member of his family has lost his mother his father his brother and his sister um and he is a very funny wrecking turn he had me in stitches one day with a series of anecdotes about sort of family incidents at the fall funerals family funerals that he's been to um so you know funerals are very sad events obviously but they tend to involve the living more than the dead um and it occurred to me that it might be an interesting structure for a for a book or or a way of looking at a family's history if you could do it through the device of four family funerals if all you were telling was what happened at this particular time when this body was being buried and you saw the same cast of characters you know the next funeral and the next one and the next one but you wouldn't have as they die um well some people die but they're always more um stepping in but you know this is a history of the living not not the dead so um i thought it would be an interesting way to tell a family's history basically um and starting with that as a framework uh i sort of went sideways and thought well you could you could do more than just tell the family history you could if you spaced those funerals out in different decades of south african history you could sort of open the window a little bit wider and show some of the background of where south africa was at that point so the structure of the book is basically four snapshots in each of which a member of the same family has been put into the ground but you're seeing more or less the same kind of characters a little bit older maybe not wiser but different um so yeah that's that's how i sort of arrived at the structure of it i'm you know like otherwise always looking for unusual ways to tell stories because most of the stories have been told by now it's just the ways of telling that you know on youtube just as in in 1986 during the state of emergency um and then then that and that is when the the almost saintly mother of this family rachel swatt dies of cancer and uh her thirteen-year-old daughter amor is pulled out of a boarding school to go home to deal with the death of her mother and with her family and then in in subsequent chapters as we transition from the 1980s into the promised uh the book is called the promise into the promise of the post-apartheid future um various other members of the family expire in in quite horrific ways and we um and we we we follow the family uh with with precisely that mordent humor that that you heard from the rock on tour who was telling you about his family as as they bury their loved ones and and various other things happen along the way um you i'd like you to read if you would blame in a section from that first chapter which is called ma after a more the 13 year old has returned home and the family has united in grief over the death of the matriarch um i'd better sort of just give a little bit of context to this reading it comes from fairly early on um and it's it's focused on the family sleeping when we start so we're visiting as it were each member of the family and we're getting a little bit of an insight into the dreams that are taking place um there'll probably be space to say more about the passage and how it works afterwards it is nice the same night but later the stars have moved on only a cuticle of moon casting the faintest metallic glow onto this landscape of rocks and hills making it look almost liquid a mercurial sea the line of the main road is stitched out now and then in slow motion by the headlamps of a car carrying its cargo of human lives going from somewhere to somewhere the house is dark except for floodlights for and aft note the nautical terms illuminating the driveway and the lawn and a single lamp left on inside in the lounge in the various rooms downstairs everything is mostly inert except for the occasional scuttling insect or is it a rodent and the tiny expansions and contractions of the furniture pitter patter creep crack but upstairs in the bedroom there's a flickering going on parked mattress is a raft tossing on a current of uneasy dreams he has taken a sedative prescribed by dr ralph and it keeps his head just under the surface looking at images refracted from above his wife is in many of them but altered somehow a bit squiff a trace in her of another person altogether someone he doesn't know how can this be he cries to her you're dead that's an unforgivable thing to say mani she tells him i'm very hurt his heart is running like an old rag i'm sorry i'm sorry through the wall beside him just an outstretched arm away astrid ripples in her sleep she has recently lost her virginity to a boy she met at the ice rink and sex flows through her like a golden wind she has forgotten the pain though it's part of the shimmer around the faces of young men with their bristly beards and in this dream around the face of dean devette in particular whose mouth is a pink color it doesn't have in waking like thrilling her deep inside down where everything meets in the guest bedroom funny marina dozers and sparks stones and starts she achieves only the beginning of a dream in which she's on a picnic with pw guerta has an old sport somewhere and he's feeding her strawberries with thick white fingers before she gets woken by a kick at home in menlo park she doesn't share a bed with hockey relief twitching beside her like a hit-and-run victim waiting for medical assistance what a thought marina assist on you but you can't help what you think it's only human and far worse has gone through your mind oh yes it has her husband's foot touches her she pulled that foot away terrible to flinch from what you once briefly loved or thought you did or wanted to think you did but are shackled to regardless for life at the other end of the chain okie jerks like a dancing there he doesn't dream not exactly unless the shadows he splashes through are a sort of dream but nothing quite happens there's just a question of color changing all the time a bubble rises from the seabed becomes a breaking of wind against the flank of his wife who stiffens and flares her nostrils in protest and in her bedroom at the end of the passage a more like sleepless hour after hour not unusual for her believe me every night before she drifts off her mind must move outward from where her body is based on its back in bed to reach out and touch certain objects in particular places in a specific order only when she's done that can she relax enough to let go but tonight it doesn't work other images from the day are too powerful they come jostling in miss starkey's pressed together lips lucas's stick hitting the ground the saw place on her arm were on pinched her so much rage in her fingers standing up little pulse of pain into the universe notice me i'm here amor schwartz 1986 may tomorrow never come who's to say perhaps all these dreams might merge together making a single larger dream a dream by the whole family that somebody is missing at this very instant he's stepping out of a bushel in a military camps in johannesburg wearing army browns and carrying a rifle he used the rifle yesterday morning to shoot and kill a woman in cattle home an act he never imagined committing in his life and his mind has done little since except turn that moment over and over in wonderment and despair the chaplain wants to see you the chaplain he's never spoken to the chaplain it can only be he thinks that the man knows what he did and wants to talk to him about it his sin has somehow transmitted himself he has taken a life he must pay but i didn't mean to but you did she was throwing a stone she bent down to pick it up a flash of rage passed through him concomitant with hers he didn't think he hated her he wiped her away all in a few seconds an instant over and done never over as i listened to you read i was reminded that your background is in the theater as a writer and as a director and even as a performer and in a way that might give us a clue to my next question uh which is who is this narrator who's floating over sleeping bodies and then a is in a is in a military campground watching the one member of the family who isn't there who who tells us to note the nautical terms that it's using and who um who says it's not unusual for amore believe me um and who who is able to be in very much inside these characters but can also kind of pull them all together and make sort of broad sweeping statements about um the merging of these dreams into one unity yeah um well i'm the narrator of course but you know every every third person every book written in the third person has a as a sort of by tradition third person omniscient voice narrating its story i've sort of been quite um i don't know what the word is but i've been wanting to write a third person narrative for quite a while um and have been frustrated by the conventions of the genre if you like in the end a third person narration is not much different to a first-person narration in the sense that you're limited um usually by the conventions that apply so even a even an omniscient narrator is meant to tell you a story that's grounded in scenes that are well established in which the reader gets a sense of okay this is your main character this might be your antagonist this is the background of the situation we're in and so on um all of which has a kind of creaky way of you know wheeling the machinery into place and and setting the plot in motion i did begin this um in a more conventional way i i i started writing the story as i conceived it um and became quickly quite frustrated with myself and with it and were the limitations that imposed and then fortuitously or otherwise i got sidetracked into writing a couple of drafts of film script which was offered to me i'm talking about a few years back i needed the money i needed the diversion and i was i was happy to be sidetracked for what eight months or so and you know the full script was good in certain respects but in one very key respect it transformed my book for me because when i returned to the novel you know um the sort of mode of narration that full scripts required was still very much in my brain and i suddenly saw that all my frustrations um with the third-person duration could be subverted if i just extended the range of the voice a little bit in other words what i what i saw was that it was possible to work with pros in the same way that a film works that i could tell the story uh with the logic of a cinematic narrative i could zoom in up close on a particular moment i could pull back really really far and give it a kind of um historical epic dimension i could i could um jump from character to character even in the middle of the scene because cameras work like that um and basically this realization was sort of scary because i didn't know if it would work but it was also quite liberating because it gave me the means to sort of play narratively so that's what i did um and part of the play which you put your finger on is that it opened up the space in the narrative voice where i could comment on the fact that i was narrating something so this is a narrator who's telling you what happens he's telling that this follows on this is the next event and so on but at the same time the narrator knows that he or she is telling a story and and is aware of the way in which he or she is telling the story theatrical convention convention to having that was also sort of quirky or unreliable in some ways um and and in that way may or may not be you damon the writer and certain things that the narrator also can't see or chooses not to see or sees and chooses not to tell us like the the evil thoughts inside of a priest or the or the dirty thoughts inside of a doctor um that that the narrator says we're not gonna go there if you don't mind or or or very memorably and very significantly uh there's a there's a there's a central character a domestic worker named salome who the narrator makes very clear is impossible to enter cannot cannot cannot be seen in the way the other characters see and that has that has our narrative and political impact yeah um i mean it's quite a short comment on your part incidentally that that that's the theatrical convention i i sort of think that satan cinema in some ways is you know ahead of um [Music] novels um because you know they play with narrative in ways that maybe the novel is not old enough to do a lot of the time because there's no reason why it shouldn't um well sorry i i i'd like to follow through on what you said because i'm as fascinated with the edge of the map where narration is concerned as i am with what what narration covers so there's there's in the same way that if you're working with cinema you know the camera moves like that but there's a whole bunch of things outside what the camera is seeing i mean a character on screen can be talking to somebody off screen and and it's sort of required of the audience that they imagine that the other character and and what's happening for example so i'm quite fascinated narratively with what's not said um in in the case of this book we're only opening the window you know in four different decades but we're not being filled in um with what might have happened to the the characters that we're picking up on in the intervening time so for me that's quite enjoyable you you see a character who's 10 years older and his life from a different place but it's not being explained to you what's taken place or where that person might have gone or what might have befallen them you just see that their life is different which actually is how a lot of human life works right you meet someone you haven't seen in years and years and you don't know everything that's happened to them but you can see that they've aged or they've changed and so on so all of that sort of off screen or off stage as it were so i quite liked that where yeah you you picked up on the fact that um we have a central black character whose life is not explained whose experiences are not narrated now obviously that's a deliberate choice on my part i mean i could have gone there but in terms of the subject matter of this book i decided early on this is a book about white south africans it's about the whites of african psyche if there is an entity like that and i thought i would look at the black characters that turn up in the story only as far as the white gaze of this narration would go which is to say not very far at all um so there was a certain amount of fun painful fun but fun nevertheless in in giving you a you know a little bit of knowledge about these black characters they're stopping right there because i know the white characters in this house would not have inquired any further than that so that's as much as i'm telling my audience as well um which in a way you know i'm not telling you something tells you something about how people think yeah i want to come back to that a little bit later but but before we do i i want to comment on on your comment that that that film and that cinema and theater are perhaps ahead of fiction of prose fiction uh when it comes to exploring all of this at some point in your writing um knowing where my heart lies literally uh you said you wanted to read some virginia woolf and you did i think you read was it mrs danaway or or to the lighthouse well i read i represent everything yeah for me why why did you want to read her while thinking about writing the promise i i sort of discovered virginia woolf at the right time i mean i think stumbled on her early on in the writing process but obviously her achievement um working with multiple voices polyphonic narratives um it's very central to what i'm doing here you know she's celebrated as a great modernist for obvious reasons um and the roots of the book lion modernism um they lie pretty much with the modernist that i dealt with earlier in my life i'm not not dealt with but that i encountered i mean very fundamental to me in my reading history was william faulkner an australian writer called patrick white um you know samuel becketts most of the people who celebrated um as you know the great modernist writers were the writers that spoke most loudly and clearly to me when my kind of writing consciousness was being shaped virginia woof wasn't part of that for whatever reason she's in a mission in my reading until um relatively it was a great pleasure incidentally to share some of my newfound enthusiasm about virginia woolf with you because i know she's an old discovery of yours but very clearly with books like the waves or to the lighthouse virginia will explain time she's playing with voice uh in ways that you know are very resonant with this particular project not that i was trying to imitate her but you know it helps to feed the general enthusiasm if you're reading people who are pretty much playing in the same way you're playing um which i'm sure you you know all about so so the the the critical writing about the novel so far has has spoken of its um proximity to wolf to joyce to faulkner so to the kind of high practitioners of modernism i would put beckett in there as well i think there's a there's some you know fantastic dialogue um uh surrealist bakety and diana in in this novel there's something that the critic james wolf wrote became excuse me james wood in his new yorker review but i urge everybody to read after comparing you very favorably to wolf's approach um he wrote modernist writing wolfs sometimes appears to have expired along with its serious and experimental people a moment when political and moral disenchantment was met by a belief in liberty's regenerative power and i think he's right about the um the modernist writing having expired it was it was very much of of the early to mid 20th century um uh he's also right that that aesthetically esther we no longer live in a serious and experimental epoch it that then was a moment of political and moral disenchantment that those writers met try to meet with their belief in literature's regenerative power your novel charts 30 years of deep political and moral disenchantment and i wonder if that's why you felt the need to reach back to these forms of modernism to to to the way wolf occupies all sorts of subjectivities uh to the absurdism of beckett uh to the elusive humor of choice as a way of dealing with this disenchantment and and i'm asking you this within the context of of the way your your story tracks i mean it's a fair question but um you know i'd be i'd feel slightly fraudulent if i if i said to you i'd i'd embarked on the writing with those intentions you know very fully formed and clear in my head that wasn't the case as i'm sure you know books accumulate you know you get an idea you get a second idea you start to play and then something else flops onto that and so on so the notion of um looking at south africa's recent history came to me quite late to be honest my my embarkation point with this book um was really to look at the family i wanted to look at this group of people i didn't really have a grand sense of staging that this might be you know um looking at something larger um that really came to me because i thought alright i've got four funerals and then i thought well you could set the four funerals in a different decade of south african history and that sort of opened up the possibility that all right there there would be a different president in power and there would be a different sort of reigning spirit over the land and it might be fun for once in a better word to sort of conjure that spirit and and to show it as part of the ethos uh of this section of the book um so the project really had quite modest aspirations in in that respect you know i i was playing with other things too which maybe don't register so strongly for example um you know that each each funeral takes place in a different scene um it's not important whether the reader notices that or not but but it's important to me um and i was somewhat surprised to be honest that so many readers have picked up on the political or historical dimension of the book because it wasn't that big in my my own mind i i was seeing the characters and the personal aspect is much larger than politics it was meant to be you know wallpaper but very clearly that's not not the way it's come across um so in a way i've sort of arrived at the end of the project at the viewpoint that james would articulate which is that yes this is sort of a book rising to meet the historical moment i i had no such you know grandiose um intention when i began i'm very very happy if i fulfilled that but it was not part of my um you know to be honest with you not part of what i was aspiring to i mean i think it's it was and i don't want to i don't want to diminish what fun might mean for a writer um i don't want to make it seem sort of casual like you know a night out on the town um but it is just quite fascinating and even a little shocking to hear you use the word fun um to describe the the writing of of what really is such pain and objection and in a way there's that that balance is very powerful in the book and in a way what when you speak about fun i wonder if it isn't uh your belief in literature's regenerative power when faced with the horror the horror as as as one of the characters anton says you know quoting other people um at what's happening for this family to the country um there does seem to be something i mean some of the critics found have found the book very bleak you know even bleaker than james could say is disgrace and we can talk about a lot in a minute but what seems to me to be not if not redemptive then when at least hopeful is is is the regenerative power of what fun means of fun as a as a way of as a creative as a creative instinct rather than yesterday i did have i want to say that i did have an enormous amount of fun writing and i'm not sure that i could have completed the project if if that wasn't the case and the sun is rooted absolutely in the voice you know which as i've articulated sort of came to me at a relatively late point when i realized that you could tell the story in unexpected way so although the story itself is heavy um and the subject matter aging and death is heavy i think the narrative voice is light and it it it was inside the narrative voice that i had the fun i had and i really did i really did um i think i would not have been able to carry on with such a depth saturated book if i was not really inventing and feeling free to kind of play with the voice so um that narrative voice basically opened up a space in which i could um comment on the characters comment on what they were thinking and doing but also comment on myself and the way that i was telling the story and there was an enormous element of play in that so um one thing in that commentary on the self that self awareness that that that ability to look at the self in in which you see sort of creative or regenerative power because some so many of these characters in this book will all of them but for one really the survivor are totally blind to who they are in the world and and the one woman who survives the one member of the family who doesn't die is able to reflect yeah i mean you're doing a juggling act as a novelist really because you you know i i work with students of fair bits creative writing students um and something i often tell them is that you know there's this idea that if you engage with your material and you have this kind of cathartic experience of you know yes i identify i relate i have these passionate emotions that you feel you've really done your job as a writer and in fact that's just the beginning of your job you you do need to engage with material you need to feel it from the inside in order to be able to set it down in any shape or form but you also need to be detached from it you need to be outside that material right to be judging it and reading it as if somebody else wrote because how are you going to improve how are you going to take it another step further if you can't be critical of your own work so there's this sort of internal engagement and this attempt to be external to pull back and look at it from outside which i think is what matters with writer's head most of the time that's fair enough and very interesting um that's about the creative process um as a right there no no could it could i go one step further which may also it's not it's not just about the process if you if you try to build it into the material now i've i've tried to do that once before with an earlier book in a strange room okay in which the narrative switches between um a first person voice the book is talking about somebody called damon who very clearly seems to be me um and sometimes i'm talking out of that person i'm speaking as an eye i did this i said this i and at other times sometimes in the same sentence i switch to an external perspective and say he did this he thought this he he said that so that's the kind of um that's a way of coding this process that i've been talking about being inside and outside of the center so we're coding it into the text itself and i've tried to do the same thing here okay so at some points this narrative is very clearly third person he or she is going here and saying that but then the voice the the narrative perspective gets so close to the character that it almost falls into that character's perspective so so when you when i when i was feeling as an arranger very very close to a particular character i would sometimes laugh into first person so if i felt very very closely identified with ma or r or a brother or a sister sometimes i would be inside their head and speaking others um which is you know um it's a conventional very of what i think is called close third-person narration where you you come so closely that you you sort of identify with the character but i sort of tried to build it in as part of the languages it was part of the idiom of the way of telling the story that it could be first person sometimes and that it would be more detached and that you know make maybe even more detached from the constitutional rather than than just a style well what do you mean by ethical that that it becomes a sort of a uh an answer to how to live particularly as a white south african uh in this country at this time or not maybe not an answer but uh but a suggestion or a a solution of how to live as a white south african at this time i have to say i feel an instinctive shrinking away um when i when i hear phrases like you know how to live the role of the novelist at a certain point um was seen as somebody who could deliver that kind of moral advice that you know the the novelist was somebody who would tell you how to live that the novelist knew that the novelist was wiser than the ordinary person that's a role for a writer i've always felt instinctively kind of um i don't know what the word is but i i i just i don't i don't have that i don't feel i do it i don't know how to live i'd have it more than you and you admit or no uh in in and i don't think that's a bad thing i mean in a way if you if you knew it you might be terribly self-righteous and and therefore a very boring novelist but it but if i think about amor who's your central character and who's the one character who doesn't die a horrible death and um the choices she makes and and her power of reflection but also what what what is in her to be able to make those choices how how she how she has to how she has to lose contact with other people to make those choices uh there's something about that that terrible predicament that he's in that makes her um to me to this reader something of a south african every person um engaged on a moral journey um and it's interesting that you don't you didn't you didn't schematize her in that way i mean thank god you didn't schematize her in that way uh but there she is one person in the book who has some sense of of of reflection of who she is in the world i can only answer this question um in terms of this particular book and how it works for me in other words i i don't see a more of the sole protagonist to be honest i i for me this book has two antagonists that is amore and her brother older brother anton and in some way at a point in the right in the one who who killed the woman in catalan uh just the day before his mother's funeral who we met and that in certain respects just uh passing detail i mean it's not clearly but in terms of the you know the the area that the book covers it's a passing detail belonging to that time in terms of his life and obviously of the life of the woman that he killed that's not a passing detail but in some way i realized during the writing of the book that amor and anton brother and sister who are facing off of this question of you know this crappy piece of land that has supposedly been left or should have been left to uh the black woman who works for their family the two of them in some way embody um what what i feel to be uh i'm sorry these are inadequate um descriptions but the two sides of my own nature and maybe the two sides of of of a kind of white south african nature if you like and trump is far more um you know selfish concern with his own interests his future his sense of self amore his younger sister who michael might not have something wrong with her is far more self-denying a little bit of a veil kind of figure somebody uh who believes you need to give stuff up for other people in order for all of us to live properly um a little bit of a saint and a little bit inadequate as a result but that um the two of them in some way represent the two aspects of my own nature so when i say i'm working off them in this book i'm not trying to prescribe what white south africans should be doing with their future i don't think what amor does which is effectively to renounce her inheritance i'm not prescribing that as a way forward for this country i don't know that that's what white south africans would be prepared to do or even whether it would help us out all i know is that in terms of the particular dilemma that i set up with this narration in other words this piece of land and what ought to happen to it that are more represents one side of my instincts which is give it up give up your inheritance give up what you own because it's the right thing to do and what is that of your instincts well you know i also i'm also a white south african i'm a white male you know in the first section of the book anton sees his future as set up for him right he's this golden boy who's just by virtue of being white and male some stepped into the position of absolute power um and if apartheid hadn't ended his life would have been set up for him basically he didn't need to do anything else that would have been handed to him and that's sort of what you and me stepped into by virtue of birth everything's changed since then and i wanted in some way to show what's changed i mean not only the future but also the options that are open to you you know anton can give up his birthright but he won't because he thinks he should be holding on to it he thinks he should hold on to what he has which are great many south africans feel them i don't know whether they're right or wrong but i i i identify without more finally more than with animals rightly or wrongly the interesting thing about anton is is that he i mean he's such a fuck-up he's an interesting but he's a up and and firstly it's it's not it it's not clear whether he's a up because you know he killed a woman when he was on active duty in the township and and then was a then became a conscientious objector and then uh the end of the party had happened whether he's a up because he his father's a up and because he comes from this family with with all sorts of intergenerational traumas um but but he doesn't he doesn't he's not being asked to give up his inheritance he's being asked to give up just a portion of his inheritance that's all which is what amor believes um was promised to salome uh the black maid and he doesn't do it not because he doesn't want to do it but just because he's kind of useless and can't make a decision and and i thought there was something about that that um that was a sort of white south african-ness a kind of an inertia um an inaction that that that i felt um quite awkwardly uh about white south africans of our generation i i wanted to say though that when you speak about these characters these two antagonists as being versions of of yourself i immediately thought of the good doctor and and of your two antagonists in the good doctor lawrence waters who's this um who's this lycamole really wants to change the world and as and as wants to give everything to making the new south africa a better place not like a more in in a more active way and then and then the more kind of um cynical narrator frank um who has has seen it all and who like anton is a casualty of having done military service and and is much more cynical and sardonic about everything i wonder of your previous works um this book resonates the promise resonates most with the good doctor i wonder if it does so for you too yeah i mean maybe for the reasons you've just raised because i mean i think that's an astute comment um as i recall i think i think i started writing the good doctor from the perspective of lawrence the more idealistic doctor and he realized that he wouldn't make a very interesting narrator i mean idealists don't make for interesting narrators generally um i i do i do think um they probably you know are more anton lawrence and frank they they do represent you know kind of warring sides of the white south african psyche i mean certainly as they sort of live in me i don't think i'm more idealistic in the way that lawrence's we should fulfill the promise and there's something sort of dogged and maybe a little bit simplistic about the way she just sticks to that we made a promise this promise must be kept um i mean for what it's worth as you say that might be sort of neurological we know a child and several other characters say they think there's something the matter with her so yes maybe there's something to matter with them or maybe her maybe her insistence on fulfilling this promise is just not realistic and that therefore there's something wrong with that um for what it's worth i mean i the this aspect of the book um the question of the land comes comes from a different friend and a different sort of family anecdote that somebody told me um which is quite sort of closely carried out in the book um this friend of mine's mother had died a long time ago she'd been very ill and she'd been tendered through her last illness by a black woman who had been working for their family for years and years and the whole family promised as the mother wished that this sort of really broken down house in which this black lady lived from a piece of land which is situated would be given to her and yes the family hedged and sort of blocked and argued despite the fact that they promised for decades and decades and decades until quite recently signing over this piece of land now this struck me as a very south african story i mean obviously you know the question of land and who owns it is is central to south africa but this is not a an important piece of land it's a useless piece of land not one that you can work with the house is not you know that's desirable and yes this family would not give it up now that strikes me as quite south africans too now whether you know whether anton and the rest of the family just are you know victims of inertia as you would have or whether they have more complicated reasons for not giving it up it's sort of part of the book to my mind it's not just inertia on anton's part although it's harder to articulate why would you not give up this shitty little house and the crack piece of land and stand on because you own it you already own it why give it up now that seems very much part of how white south africa operates to me you know it's it's naive and simplistic maybe to a level that matches a more but i've often wondered how much difference this country would be if let's let's leave color out of it if people who are privileged enough to own a little money a little land a little something in the setup we have here we just give up part of it to people who have nothing maybe our general situation would be very different and maybe a little bit better so i guess that unspoken question is behind the book that is um that's that's abs that's beautifully put um it um it is rarely that which which state it's it's it's it's those ideas unformed in my mind that that stayed with me when when i finished the book um claire missouri in her review in harper's said the promise evokes when you reach the final page a profound interior shift that is all but physical this as an experience of art happens only rarely and it is to be prized and i mean i think those words are true i've been thinking about what that profound interior shift is what it is that feels so shifted uh by having finished this book and maybe that's it it it it's being faced with with a thought of how our world might be different if if those of us who had something uh were willing to give it up and and and and i suppose even even if you you didn't set out to write a moral fable and as i said thank god you didn't the fact that that's what one leaves with uh puts the book the novel in in in in that realm uh and does also make me think of could see as disgrace um now james wood directly uh connects your book to this grace and in disgrace you also have a white woman who who decides to stay on the land and give birth to the child of her rapist even after she's been viciously attacked rather than fleeing the land fleeing the country which he could do i wondered if you were thinking of could see and disgrace when you were writing i mean it's hard not to right it's it's a book that caught quite a long shadow and i was aware that amor in some respects probably conjured you know that female figure the at the end of cutie's book i sort of hoped i'd sidestep this until i gave it um to a few people to read for their feedback um amongst those people as you know with you and you raised this question um so i've i sort of thought well maybe i haven't escaped quite as neatly as i as i believed um i wrestle i wrestled with that question but i don't think that's that what's being asked of people is the same in both cases i mean you're somewhat uh colliding over the matter of the rape in um in disgrace because a lot of my feminist friends were outraged by disgrace or at least very very exercised by it you know it seems to be the case that that he's saying this is the price this is the price of living in the new south africa that perhaps you will be violated and that you will simply have to accept that and that that that is the cost i don't think that's what's being articulated in my book at least it's certainly not what i was consciously trying to articulate having to give up your bodily integrity is one thing having to give up a small piece of land even a small piece of your inheritance is quite another um i i don't know that i would prescribe for white south africans giving up their bodily integrity as a way forward but i do think it's not perhaps too much to ask that why south africans give up something of what they have um it seems a more realistic way forward if if i may say that again not that i was prescribing that as a way forward it really is um something that arose out of the terms that my my own book created and i'm possible i would argue that it's a very simplistic reading of to read that he's advocating that or that his character is advocating that um right i mean i i i'd agree and argue the point too but but even in broad terms it seems to me that um you know what what's being asked of lucy i believe her name is at the end of disgrace is a different proposition to what amor has chosen to give up at the end of my book damon we have to end and we have to end sharply because of um no chatting and our host load ship i'm pretty sorry we have a very little of this conversation i'd love to go on for another hour but please everybody read this book um i love it i think i think you will uh and thank you very much for being with us it's been a great pleasure thank you it's passed very quickly it has these online launches seem to go by in a blink of a blink of an eye um here's here's the the book that we've been talking about so that you can all see what it looks like and and make sure you go and get yourselves a copy if you haven't yet um thank you very much mark and damon for a really fascinating conversation it seems that uh one small positive of these online book launches we are being forced to have at the moment is that the resulting videos are available for anyone to watch for as long as the internet is around and it's really wonderful that we'll have this conversation about a future classic in the archive of south african literature online forever um thank you very much to penguin random house for helping us put this launch together if you haven't got a copy of the promise yet as i say surely this discussion will um make you want to run out and get one as soon as possible um and who knows maybe one day you can meet damon in real life and he'll sign it for you if you're lucky perhaps when this is all over thank you very much for joining us and have a good evening thanks to both of you bye-bye

Channel: The Reading List

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Length: 59min 0sec (3540 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 02 2021