Galgut made good use of novelistic licence to evoke the repressed romantic yearning of Forster’s middle age, but ended up flattening the man’s wit and humour into a grey pallor. The book’s principal achievement was the seamless integration of archival research with imaginative reconstruction. Galgut’s last novel, Arctic Summer (2014), was a fictionalised account of the gestation of A Passage to India during E M Forster’s travels in the subcontinent. His fiction rarely descends to humour when it does, he prefers the mordant and bleak to the merely amusing. He shares with his better known compatriots Nadine Gordimer and J M Coetzee an unrelenting moral seriousness, a striving for a vision of the world without illusions. How to live with integrity in a country, South Africa, with so chequered a recent history? How to respond to the disappointments of workaday politics once the heady days of the new republic have passed?
That means he has now been writing long enough to have claimed for himself a characteristic set of themes.
Damon Galgut’s first, and precocious, novel was published in 1982.
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