The Promise

Falling somewhere between Astrid’s crass selfishness and Amor’s earnest gentleness, Anton leads the reader to consider alternate meanings to the novel’s title other than the promise Manie made to Rachel. The eldest Swart sibling, Anton is a young man full of promise at the book’s start, but he gradually slides into depression and hopelessness.

From the moment the reader meets Anton, he experiences inner turmoil: After firing a shot into a group of rioters, he realizes his bullet killed a woman, and he is traumatized by the event. Later, he is the only character who immediately sees through Reverend Simmers’s sanctimony and intuitively distrusts the influence Simmers has over Manie. In these instances, he appears discerning and sensitive.

However, Anton is also his own worst enemy, indulging in capricious decisions that damage rather than improve his life. When he deserts the army, he wants an adventurous change of pace but winds up mired in poverty and hardship. When he marries Desirée, he thinks he is starting an exciting new life but fails to realize he and Desirée have completely different priorities and values. When he starts gambling, he thinks he will help his family’s precarious fortunes but only further jeopardizes them. All these actions lead to the nagging sense that he is wasting his promise, which sends him into a depression spiral that ends in his suicide. He contains both the young soldier who felt such terrible guilt at ending a Black woman’s life and the young farmer who wonders if the Black woman who raised him deserves a decaying three-room shack. He straddles darkness and light, teetering between discomfort with change and enthusiasm for progress.

Astrid, the middle Swart sibling, is one of the characters least likely to garner readers’ sympathy. She enters the book lying about her devotion to her dying mother and develops very little moral maturity from that moment to her untimely death in Part 3. Everything she values—wealth, high social status, and pristine physical appearance—involves superficial self-presentation.

Many of Astrid’s worst qualities are visible from her earliest appearances. She reacts with annoyance rather than sympathy when Amor gets her first period during Rachel’s funeral. As an adult, Astrid naively thinks everything in the country is fixed when apartheid ends and that Black South Africans have nothing left to worry about. In Part 3, she brags to Amor about attending President Mbeki’s inauguration, not thinking about how Mbeki makes Amor’s job harder by ignoring the AIDS crisis. The only lens through which she evaluates any event is how it affects her.

If there is anything about Astrid the reader can sympathize with, it is her insecurity and inability to figure out what she wants. Her teenage bulimia continues throughout her entire adult life, and she constantly believes she should be thinner. When she converts to Catholicism, she thinks that confession allows her the chance to do whatever she wants as long as she admits it later. This does not bring true satisfaction, however, and is merely a quick fix to avoid the difficult work of self-examination. The affairs she has during both her marriages highlight her conviction that some better version of herself and her life is always just out of reach.

For most of the novel, Amor, the youngest Swart sibling, acts as the family’s conscience. She is the only Swart determined to make sure that Manie honors his promise to Salome, and she is the only member of the immediate Swart family to live through the entire book. For these reasons, Amor is the most clear-cut protagonist despite the ever-shifting point of view that drifts away from her for long stretches at a time.

Amor, the only living family member who does not depend on the family’s resources for financial support, works in service roles, spending much of the novel as a nurse at an AIDS ward. She wants to help people, but she also carries guilt over her family’s mistreatment of Salome. Therefore, her voluntary meager living demonstrates both a genuine expression of her caring nature and an attempt to absolve herself of some of the guilt of her family’s behavior.

When Lukas condemns Amor for thinking herself heroic when she offers him and his mother the shack they live in, both she and the reader are forced to reexamine her character. Just because she is the most sympathetic Swart family member does not mean that she has done all she should. Yes, she mentions the promise continuously and presses various family members to honor it, but she never goes a step further and takes decisive action to make it happen. Lukas’s honesty gives her the chance to shake off any last vestiges of self-induced martyrdom and assess how she can be a more useful ally to her Black South African neighbors.

Manie’s sister Marina is the template for the woman Astrid eventually becomes. She displays all the same classism, racism, and pretension. She has no imagination or curiosity, preferring only to consider information that confirms her already-held opinions. Her impatience and selfishness make her a particularly uncomforting presence in the seasons of death that dominate the novel. Her disgust that Rachel converts back to Judaism toward the end of her life serves as a valuable reminder to readers that anti-Black sentiments are not the only kind of prejudice plaguing South Africa.

The fact that Marina lives throughout most of the book, stubbornly holding on to her opinions and rejecting the country’s drift toward less racist policies, represents the difficulty of enacting major social changes when some people will always see other people’s opportunities as a threat to their own supremacy. While many characters in the novel wrestle with the same racist feelings that Marina has, she displays them most unabashedly.

While readers could argue that everyone in the Swart family except Amor is an antagonist in the novel for their refusal to honor Manie’s promise, Reverend Alwyn Simmers claims the title of foremost non-Swart antagonist. A rank hypocrite, Simmers represents the corruption that makes progress so halting and incomplete in contemporary South Africa. Simmers continuously takes advantage of Manie, using him for land and money at every opportunity. The more readers get to know Simmers, the less surprising it is that Manie’s spiritual development is stunted and surface-level given that Simmers is his spiritual guide.

When Anton apologizes to Simmers for being eligible for Manie’s inheritance payments, he sees that Simmers lives lavishly, residing in a luxurious house and clothing himself with expensive garments. He is a grifter, playing on his congregation’s respect for him to enrich himself. Worst of all, Simmers lives with a grave sin—an incestuous sexual experience with his sister—and never confesses or repents of it, choosing instead to compartmentalize it in his mind. The fact that he never suffers any consequences for his behavior by the end of the novel reinforces the idea that South Africa suffers because men like Simmers go free, their hypocrisy and greed enriching them boundlessly.