The Promise

"Winner"

"It is a very introspective examination of the lives of a group of individuals, a study of a family and family dynamics, and an account of South Africa over the course of decades—from the later years of Apartheid, into the present. And he’s able to manage all of these registers with a seamlessness that is almost deceptively simple. There’s an incredible flow. It’s in four sections, and each of the sections is unbroken as a piece of narrative. But what he’s doing through it is moving you subtly from one person’s mind to somebody else’s mind, from the past into the present, from one kind of consciousness to another. To me it’s evocative of Virginia Woolf in the way that it brings together —as the human mind does—past and present, memory and subjectivities, and the way people sort of bounce off each other. I do think that novels are stronger when they have ideas in them. But I’m not sure that I would want to set guidelines around how we understand those ideas. Because, after all, one of the magical things about novels is that they’re able to enter experience from so many different vantage points on so many different scales. And I think that there’s a risk sometimes when people talk about ‘big ideas’ that they’re implying certain forms of treatment of them. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I see this in my ‘real life’ as a historian, that there’s this idea that the ‘big book’ is the book that is, first of all, actually heavy, and, second of all, is dealing with particular things, usually to do with state power, international relations and war . By contrast, books that deal with families or women’s lives, or the cultural sphere, or sexuality, or aspects of race, are not put into that category of ‘the big book’. I’m speaking here about nonfiction . But I do think that sometimes there’s a little bit of a risk, even with fiction , where you see people dismissing certain sorts of books as being too much about, for instance, the domestic. Right. I think ideas are really important, but how they’re approached can vary wildly."

"A rare example of a novel melding savage political and historical insight with brilliant literary structure. He captures a great deal about the last few decades in South Africa through the changes in one family."