Cal Revely-Calder 03 November 2021 8:00pm GMT Last year, the Booker Prize was gloriously simple: it was clear who should and would win. Douglas Stuart duly did, with_ _Shuggie Bain, the

heart-rending tale of a working-class Glasgow boy, trapped by an alcoholic mother and the city’s 1980s decline. But this year, there were multiple options, which confronted the judges with

the chance to be brave. I feared they wouldn’t, and so it has proved. The winner – Damon Galgut, who’s twice been a bridesmaid before – is not the best novel on the shortlist: not the most

formally inventive, not the most engrossingly staged, and – however its politics might seem – not the soundest of heart.  The Promise is a caustic satire on South African apartheid and its

the issue up.  Galgut is a dextrous writer: in this alone, he’s at the fore of the shortlisted six. Through free indirect discourse, he shuttles us from one Swart’s head into another as,

down the decades, they make love and internal war. But The Promise’s structuring principle is, to me, its critical flaw. Its black characters are few, and they’re hopelessly blank; they hang

around, light on speeches or thoughts, while we toggle between the white people in charge. Galgut has talked of “wrong-footing” us, as if his picture of apartheid would make today’s white

readers suddenly realise how complicit they are. But the horrors of that era, and our own, are well understood, and the difference between lectures and satires is that the latter trade on

our implied ability to learn and to change. The grotesque Swarts, down the years, do not (and that includes the anomaly, kind-hearted Amor); so Salome goes on being sidelined by them and

Galgut alike. Her characterisation, after all, is his choice. To invent sympathetic black characters then seal off their lives is a conjuration of apartheid’s logic – but it doesn’t amount

to a critique. Compare its lack of subtlety with, for my money, the winner _manqué_: Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North. The most accomplished novel of the six, it relates a young Sri

Lankan man’s journey to the funeral of his grandmother’s carer, interwoven with memories of vanished romance and the old lady’s slow decline. Its long sentences unfold with patient beauty;

their psychology is convincing and rich. And its backdrop, the Civil War and the restive peace, emerges like an odour from every corner of present-day life – which rings true to how

politics, all-pervasive and wearyingly complex, actually engulfs our lives. The bravest choice, however, would have been Patricia Lockwood, and bravery would have done the Booker, and the

readers it kindles, no harm. In sparky and comic fragments, her debut novel, No One is Talking About This, depicts what the internet has done to our brains, then segues into the tragedy of

the narrator’s niece, born disabled and soon to die. While its jokes can seem exclusive to the terminally online – the narrator becomes famous after tweeting: “Can a dog be twins?” – its

humour is constant, its tonal shift is astonishing, and its form demands you show quickness of wit. Galgut’s victory aside, my bone to pick is upon this theme. At the shortlisting stage, we

lost two strong contenders, edged out by Lockwood for (apparently) the lone “experimental slot”. I’d have had Karen Jennings in the race for An Island, a South African political allegory,

and Rachel Cusk for Second Place, an uneasy, evasive romance. Both are intensely atmospheric, and eschew naturalistic untidiness for a smoother style between fable and dream. The first cuts,

then, were the deepest. A lesson for the Booker: a novel may think it knows where it stands, but it can be wrong – and stances are not what give novels their depth.