I thought Galgut’s The Promise showed sufficient – well, forgive me – promise to justify trying another of his earlier Booker contenders. In a Strange Room stretches the definition of novel to near-breaking point. It comprises three first-person (although more on that in a minute) narratives. The narrator is a South African writer named Damon. In the first section, The Follower, Damon is travelling in Greece when he meets a German tourist, Reiner. They strike up a strangely detached friendship which is renewed months later when they plan a walking trip together in Lesotho. Damon seems to be on holiday perpetually, and when back in South Africa couch-surfs without every needing to find a job. His trip to Lesotho is funded by Reiner, but the practicalities of a walking tour in a tropical African country with very limited infrastructure are never adequately addressed. Part-way through the tour an argument leads to Damon abandoning Reiner and the trip and returning to South Africa. Throughout the narrative there is a luke-warm sexual tension between the two men which is never acted upon.
The ‘novel’ thing to do would have been to have Reiner appear during the later narratives in the novel, but Galgut eschews this approach. Instead he is quietly forgotten as Damon moves on to his next adventure, this time a walking trip (initially solo) in Africa. This chapter, ‘The Lover’, appears to be set a few years after ‘The Follower’. Damon is older and a little wiser, but still listlessly travelling non-stop without the burden of a career or occupation to hold him back from his nomadic existence. In Zimbabwe he meets three Europeans – a French man and a pair of Swiss twins. Although they have different routes they keep bumping into one another, until eventually they decide to travel together. Damon is clearly attracted to one of the twins, Jerome, who has “a beauty that is almost shocking”, and changes his travel plans to he can join them. They crisscross Southern Africa with the expected complications with visas and passports, but not a lot happens. Damon doesn’t appear to enjoy his travelling – he really could be anywhere. Later he follows Jerome back home to Switzerland before moving on to London and beyond. The relentless travelling without destination or direction is obviously a metaphor for how Galgut sees his own life, but it gets a bit tedious.
The novel’s final section, ‘The Guardian’, features yet another unsuccessful journey. Damon accompanies Anna, a friend suffering from manic depression, on a recuperative journey to India. He is totally out of his depth in dealing with Anna’s illness – despite his best endeavours he cannot protect her from herself, and she ends up taking an overdose. The Indian hospital system struggles to give her the treatment she needs to survive, and the situation descends into a chaotic, distressing nightmare.
These three journeys have some thematic links, but they also had a strong personal memoir sense. On an ‘acknowledgments’ page at the end of the text, the author thanks the editors of the Paris Review ‘where these pieces first appeared, suggesting that they may not have been conceived as part of a larger whole at the time they were originally published, and have been welded rather uncomfortably together to create a text of sufficient length to justify publication in a book format. Although ostensibly they are all about journeys, the third section involves very little travelling, and is really focused on the serious issues regarding metal health and suicide. I don’t think they sat together well at all, and ‘three long short stories’ would have been a more honest representation of the text.
In a Strange Room is written in the third person, but occasionally often the narrative flips to the first person: he talks about the Damon character as if he is someone else, and then at other times, sometimes changing in the course of a single sentence, he will describe him as “me”. To me this was a slightly irritating device. After the initial confusion of working out what was happening – was there someone else present? – it just became an affectation. I assume it was a way of showing the unreliability of memory – when the memory was vivid ‘I’ was used because the narrator felt present, when it was less clear ‘he’ was used to indicate the lack of connection. That’s how I rationalised it anyway. But it emphasised all the more clearly that In a Strange Room is a memoir, albeit an unreliable one used as a creative springboard for a novel about rootlessness.
Periodically sitcoms (especially long-running ones) have clip-shows – episodes comprised principally of clips from previous episodes, put together mainly to maximise the use of content originally used elsewhere. I can’t shake the suspicion that In a Strange Room is the novelists version of that technique. There’s plenty of precedent for this approach – the one that springs to mind is Raymond Chandler who re-used short stories originally published in crime magazines as the components of novels such as The Big Sleep. But Chandler could get away with this, making the whole much larger than the parts. I’m not sure Galgut achieves the same effect.
Beryl Bainbridge has been on my ‘must read more by this author’ list for a long time, particularly since I enjoyed her ‘An Awfully Big Adventure‘ back in 2018. It’s taken me until now to act on that resolution, and only then because I came across her Master Georgie, which was shortlisted for the 1998 Booker Prize, in a charity shop at a bargain price.
The novel is told in six brief chapters, which Bainbridge describes as ‘plates’, introducing the photography theme which provides a structure for the novel. The opening plate/chapter is told by Myrtle, a Victorian foundling who has been taken in (and is later adopted) by the Hardy family who are from Liverpool. Any echoes of another orphan child found in Liverpool and taken in by a family (Heathcliff?) seem coincidental. Myrtle is obsessively devoted to Master Georgie, the son of the household. Set in 1846 this introductory chapter tells the events of the day of Mr Hardy senior’s ignominious death of a heart attack in a brothel, and how his body is smuggled back into the family home in a cart (previously used to present a Punch and Judy show) to try to avoid any scandal.
Four years later we next hear from Pompey Jones, an Artful Dodger-like character who having helped with the removal of Mr Hardy’s body from the brothel to his bed has become another part of the extended Hardy household. Pompey is working with Master Georgie, now the master of the household. on his experiments with amateur photography. George is now married and a surgeon. There are also hints in Pompey’s narrative that his relationship with George has a sexual component.
Another time skip takes the novel to the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854 Sevastopol. For reasons that are unclear (to me on a first read, I may have missed something by way of explanation) George having signed on as an army doctor, has been followed into the conflict by Myrtle, his brother in law Dr Potter, and their families. Pompey is also there as an assistant to a war photographer travelling in the trusty and multi-purpose Punch and Judy cart. This chapter is narrated by Dr Potter, and having checked it seems his explanation for travelling into the heart of a war-zone is that he needs to be there as an ‘observer’ which seems unconvincing at best.
The conflict gradually heats up and comes to dominate the narrative, ending in the bloody battle of Inkerman. These are the strongest scenes of the novel in which the horror of the conflict is captured in gory detail. Death, which has dominated all the sections of the book, almost overwhelms it.
One of the things that stood out from An Awfully Big Adventure was the author’s clever manipulation of point of view narration to slowly build the narrative. It’s the jigsaw building method of story-telling, where the final picture only emerges as the pieces are assembled by the different perspectives. Bainbridge uses the same technique here, although to much lesser effect. The narrators leave it to the reader to fill in many gaps in the narrative, but it is fairly easy to piece these together and work out the relationships between the characters with a little care and attention. When the final picture is assembled in An Awfully Big Adventure it is with a sense of revelation, something that is lacking here. Constructing the novel around the six photographs, one taken in each ‘plate’ was probably a clever idea, but it runs the risk of being over-pleased with the conceit without adding much to the narrative. Each chapter is a snapshot of events rather than part of a coherent narrative, and while piecing the connections between each ‘plate’ is a comfortable enough task for the reader, it didn’t feel as rewarding as I think the author may have intended.
Master Georgie is a lesser novel in other ways. Myrtle has the potential to be a central character, but her portrait is horribly one-dimensional. Apart from her slave-like devotion to Master George, to the extent of having his children and then giving them up to his wife to raise as her own, her character has no depth whatsoever. All she does is follow George around like a puppy dog. This is such a waste of a potentially interesting character – it would have been interesting to have seen her gradually come to realise that he didn’t deserve her devotion for instance, or for her to have found something to do other than hang around on the off-chance he might need her. Dr Potter is also problematic (although to a lesser extent). The amateur Victorian geologist is something of a cliché in the first place, but his role in the novel is unclear other than to provide a contrasting voice to the other narrators. Why does he follow George to war? I understand there was an element of war tourism in the Crimea, but Potter isn’t there for that. For the initial stage of the journey he is accompanied by his wife and children, as is George, even though it is clear that a serious conflict is brewing. It just makes no sense why they would all recklessly head off to the Crimea in the way they do. George seeks out the conflict because he believes he can help as a doctor, and possibly as some form of redemption for previous weaknesses or to prove himself (the novel’s title infantilises him, suggesting he needs to do some growing up), but the presence of the others is inexplicable.
Master Georgie has the beginnings of a great novel about the Crimean War, using that conflict to reflect on Victorian society, class and personal relationships. The structure of the novel, based around the six photographs, is cleverly designed. There are glimpses of what might have been, but only glimpses. It had an incomplete or draft feel to it. I have no issue with the reader being asked to do the heavy-lifting and sketch in the missing details of relationships between characters, for example, but here even when that work is done we are left with a picture with too many missing pieces.
Any novel set in modern South Africa is going to be about apartheid. There’s obviously no way of avoiding the subject, but the author needs to find a way of addressing it that is original, to find a new way of telling the same story. The Promise is an interesting addition to the collection of novels that try to talk about the experience of the end of apartheid. It might say more about my reading choices than anything else, but most of these stories tend to be told from the white/Afrikaans perspective.
The Promise is told predominantly from the perspective of the Swart family, landowners and farmers just outside Pretoria. I say predominantly but one of the distinguishing features of this novel is the extraordinarily fluid narrative voice. It moves from character to character and scene to scene remarkably quickly, and there is often a beat where the reader re-orientates themselves to the new point of view. While it is usually made clear quickly who’s eyes we are now seeing the world from, that moment of uncertainty is disorientating. As a technique this is really effective in keeping the reader focussed on the word on the page – this is not a novel you can coast through, not without getting thoroughly confused anyway! It is broken into four sections, each set around ten years apart and focussed on the death of a family member.
Amor is the youngest daughter of the Swart family, and the closest the novel comes to a central figure. She is the still centre of the novel around which the other characters revolve. She witnesses her mother, on her death-bed, ask her father to promise to give the family servant, Salome, ownership of the run-down house she occupies on the family farm. The promise is given but insignificant to him and he quickly forgets it. When reminded by Amor he can barely recall having done so (although he never denies it) but it is clear he has no intention of doing keeping his promise. The worth of his promises is underlined when he assures Amor she will not have to return to the hostel she has been living in during her mother’s sickness, another promise that is quickly broken.
As successive family members die, Amor returns to the family farm to remind the surviving members of her father’s promise. Each time the issue is raised it is waved away as a nuisance. It’s hard not to translate this situation to the wider political context, with the farm representing the country and the promise being a political commitment to restore ownership of the land to the black community. During the course of the novel the apartheid regime comes to an end, the Truth and Reconciliation Committee completes its work, and Nelson Mandela is freed and becomes President. But the white community as represented in the novel retains its privileges and its prejudices, and the changes going on in the outside world seem to leave the Swart’s unaffected.
Of course the word ‘promise’ can also mean potential, and this novel is also about the wasted potential of the younger generation of the family. As a young woman, Amor promises to be beautiful, but that promise is (it is suggested) wasted, as she rejects her family, breaks contact with them other than to attend periodic funerals, and refuses to accept any income from the farm under the terms of a family will. This money collects in a trust account and she intends it to eventually go to Salome.
Anton, Amor’s older brother, undergoes a steady mental breakdown through the course of the novel. This breakdown is precipitated when, during his army service, he shoots and kills a woman protestor on the same day his mother dies. He believes he is in some way responsible for his mother’s death. It is that which troubles him, not the death of the black woman herself. He slowly descends into alcoholism, and while doing so tries to write a novel, which eventually Amor comes to read. She describes it like this:
“There are interjections from the author in the margins too. Is this a family saga or a farm novel? one says. And another. Weather is indifferent to history! And also, Is this comedy or tragedy? ..The phases of the man’s life, separated by intervals of roughly ten years, will map out his development into full maturity, from promise through defeat to return and ripening, in tandem with the seasons.” (277/278)
It is quite common for authors to anticipate and address critics comments within the novel itself, but I am not sure if I can remember someone doing it quite so openly. The Promise is both a family saga and a farm novel (another genre that is new to me!), and while the rest of this description parallels without quite matching the novel in which it appears, it seemed to me a very unsubtle way of reminding the reader that this is just a novel not a record of a real family’s lives. This breaking of the fourth wall happens at several points throughout the novel. At one point the narrator’s restless focus switches to a homeless man, almost as if by accident. After he is arrested for vagrancy, fined and discharged, the narrator observes:
He has a long walk ahead of him, back to the church that he regards as home, but there’s no reason to accompany him and, come to think of it, there never was. Why is he obscuring our view, this unwashed, raggedy man, demanding sympathy, using a name that doesn’t belong to him, how did he waste our time with his stories? He’s very insistent on being noticed, how self-centred of him, what an egotist he is. Pay him no further mind. (203/204)
The Promise reminded me of the 2007 Booker winner, Anne Enright’s The Gathering. Both are constructed around families returning to the family home for a funeral, both of course won the Booker, and both front covers feature photographs of young girls staring directly down the camera. The Promise is the stronger, more interesting of the two, and I can see why it won last year’s Booker (from what seems quite a weak shortlist). Eventually it fizzles out, stopping rather than ending, and I was left wishing for a novel about apartheid that for once isn’t written from the white people’s perspective. Galgut could have given the black characters in this novel more than just a handful of lines, and portrayed them as more than victims or walk-on characters. Perhaps it’s not his place to write about the black South African experience of apartheid, (it’s not like he portrays apartheid as a good thing! or his racist characters in a positive way) just that the attempts at redemption by Amor (she goes to work as a nurse in ward for Aids victims) seem pathetic by comparison with the scale of the crime that was apartheid.
Before you start to read any novel you have a set of expectations (sorry) about what it is going to be like, both in terms of the broad plot outline and some of the likely features. These ideas are informed by other novels and works you may have read by the author, the novel’s representation in popular culture, and smaller details such as the cover illustrations and comments on the blurb. You may also have read reviews and commentary on the text. All this adds up to a picture before you even start reading, and for classic novels such as Great Expectations that picture is fairly detailed. My perception of Great Expectations was something like this: I knew that the novel started with the central character, Pip, meeting an escaped convict in an isolated churchyard (the name Abel Magwitch is pretty unforgettable). I knew that the novel features a Miss Havisham who lives among the ruins of her wedding feast. I also knew that at some point Pip moves up in the world and becomes a young gentleman, presuming this to be related to his great expectations. Beyond that things were a bit hazier. I assumed, given that this was Dickens, that there would be long-lost relatives reunited with siblings or children at some point, evil villains plotting the downfall of the innocent hero or heroine, and that fortunes would be inherited and marriages arranged at the end of the novel to end with a happily-ever-after finale. Finally, I also assumed Pip would probably be the novel’s hero, and would exemplify all the positive virtues we expect of such a hero – kindness, loyalty, honesty etc. In short, I suspected the novel would be a reworking of David Copperfield or Oliver Twist.
Of course I was quite wrong. Pip is a flawed character who ends the novel with a redemption, of sorts, but spends much of it being disloyal and unkind to his relatives. At one point he receives a letter telling him he is going to receive a visit from his brother-in-law, the ever amiable blacksmith Joe Gargery. Pip is brutally honest about his reaction to this news:
“Let me confess exactly with what feelings I looked forward to Joe’s coming. Not with pleasure, though I was bound to him by so many ties; no; with considerable disturbance, some mortification, and a keen sense of incongruity. If I could have kept him away by paying money, I certainly would have paid money.”
This is not the reaction of a hero – but it is intensely human of Pip to admit to these feelings. Unlike the conventional plot of a traditional Victorian novel the hero here doesn’t inherit a fortune, he loses one (arguably two). The romance at the heart of the novel is painful and unrequited, as far from a traditional love story as it is possible to be. In other words this is a novel that confounds the readers expectations – the title becomes not a promise but almost a taunt. Pip’s expectations as to how his life is to develop may be great, but they are not realised. His life is not conventionally tragic but he is not really the hero of his own story, and his realisation that his life is not going to take the trajectory he anticipated is far from what the reader will have come to expect from Dickens. I once argued that Dickens an extremely consistent if not predictable novelist, and that it was hard to see much progression in his work. Great Expectations confounds that theory – it is clearly the work of a mature novelist who knows that some novels need more than a happy-ever-after ending in which all the loose ends are tidied away.
Pip’s redemption is the core concept of the novel, but it is also very much an adventure story. Dickens brilliantly captures the reader’s attention in the opening pages by diving straight into the novel’s key scene. Magwitch has Pip by the throat almost before Pip has had time to introduce himself:
My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip….
Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dikes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.
“Hold your noise!” cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. “Keep still, you little devil, or I’ll cut your throat!”
A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared, and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.
“Oh! Don’t cut my throat, sir,” I pleaded in terror. “Pray don’t do it, sir.”
Notice how Magwitch appears to Pip almost as if risen from the dead. The sense of place evoked in these lines is extraordinary.
The novel is constructed in three parts, all three books being narrated by Pip from some distant point in his future. In book one Pip is a seven year old orphan living with his older sister and her blacksmith husband Joe Gargery on the coastal marshland of Kent. On Christmas Eve Pip meets Abel Magwitch, an escaped convict in the scene shown above. Magwitch scares Pip into stealing a file (to remove his chains) and some food and drink. Magwitch is swiftly recaptured, along with another convict with whom he has been fighting. This is an almost dream-like memory for Pip who has no idea of the significance it is going to have for his later life.
The other key childhood memory for Pip occurs when Miss Havisham, she of jilted at the altar fame, asks neighbour Mr Pumblechook to find a boy to visit her. (Out of context this seems a strange request – she takes little pleasure from Pip’s visits and instructs him simply to ‘play’. Pip sees nothing particularly unusual because he is a child and has yet to develop a sense of what is and isn’t strange. He is unphased by the fact that she still wears her old wedding dress and is surrounded by the detritus of her wedding day. Pip is smitten by Estella, Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter. Estella has been brought up by Miss Havisham to be hostile to all men, as a perverse form of revenge on the male sex. The regular visits to Satis House eventually end when Pip becomes as an apprentice blacksmith in Joe’s smithy. The final turning point of this stage of Pip’s life, and this book of the novel, comes when Mr Jaggers, a lawyer, tells Pip that he has been given a large sum of money from an anonymous benefactor, allowing him to leave the forge and become a gentleman.
The second book of the novel follows Pip’s experiences in London. He lives with Herbert Pocket, the son of his tutor, a cousin of Miss Havisham. Pip is convinced Miss Havisham is the source of his good fortune. He learns more about her story which cements that conviction. He sees little of Estella and even less of his sister and her husband. Despite his generous allowance he builds up some serious debts. For me this section of the novel lagged. Pip seems to waste most of his time trying to become a gentleman, although the precise nature of his tuition with Mr Pocket is never described (nor barely mentioned). Fortunately this period of his life comes to an end when he finally learns that his benefactor is not Miss Havisham but Abel Magwitch, who has made his fortune (we are never told how) in Australia. Pip is traumatised by this news – he feels any money he receives from Magwitch is compromised and must be returned. As Orwell rightly points out in his classic essay on Dickens, ‘Pip is conscious all along of his ingratitude towards Joe, but far less so of his ingratitude towards Magwitch. When he discovers that the person who has loaded him with benefits for years is actually a transported convict, he falls into frenzies of disgust…not because when Pip was a child he had been terrorized by Magwitch in the churchyard; it is because Magwitch is a criminal and a convict. But Pip’s sense of revulsion towards Magwitch slowly changes as he comes to realise that the convict may be a criminal but his instincts and intentions are far from evil.
The final book of the novel draws these threads together as everyone is given an ending suitable to their character. There are some dramatic incidents in which fate intervenes to ensure justice is served, and some long-lost secrets are revealed. I am as you can see trying to avoid too many spoilers. Pip matures significantly once he learns that his chance meeting with Magwitch in the churchyard all those years ago was the source of his great expectations. This seems to lead him to be determined to do the right thing regardless of the personal cost. He eventually comes to see Magwitch in a loving, dedicated way (feelings surely more due to Joe) and he dedicates himself to caring for the convict at the end.
While this is not a typical Dickens novel neither is it short on the things we expect and love from his work. The central characters are convincingly realised, even when they are eccentric or downright unpleasant. The plot is more compact and less byzantine than usual, and the cast of minor characters with strange names and idiosyncratic personalities – while still very much present – is shorter than in many of his earlier novels. The humour is often subdued – there aren’t many laugh out loud moments, although I did enjoy this description of a Saturday night at the Three Jolly Bargemen:
There was a group assembled round the fire … attentive to Mr. Wopsle as he read the newspaper aloud…. A highly popular murder had been committed, and Mr. Wopsle was imbrued in blood to the eyebrows. He gloated over every abhorrent adjective in the description, and identified himself with every witness at the Inquest. He faintly moaned, “I am done for,” as the victim, and he barbarously bellowed, “I’ll serve you out,” as the murderer. He gave the medical testimony, in pointed imitation of our local practitioner; and he piped and shook, as the aged turnpike-keeper who had heard blows, to an extent so very paralytic as to suggest a doubt regarding the mental competency of that witness. The coroner, in Mr. Wopsle’s hands, became Timon of Athens; the beadle, Coriolanus. He enjoyed himself thoroughly, and we all enjoyed ourselves, and were delightfully comfortable. In this cosy state of mind we came to the verdict Wilful Murder.
Great Expectations is commonly considered one of Dickens’s greatest works. It was ranked above Bleak House, David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities in the BBC Big Read survey back in 2003. I am not sure it merits that status – it goes without saying it is a great novel, but for me it didn’t have the depth of some of the others mentioned here. The fact that he changed the novel’s ending to allow readers the hope of a reconciliation between Pip and Estella suggests Dickens may have had his doubts as well.
The Reading Bug 
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