Product Description

Now available in paperback, "The Impostor" is the first new novel from Damon Galgut since the Man-Booker-shortlisted "The Good Doctor". When Adam moves into an abandoned house on the dusty edge of town, he is hoping to recover from the loss of his job and his home in the city. But when he meets Canning - a shadowy figure from his childhood - and Canning's enigmatic and beautiful wife, a sinister new chapter in his life begins. Canning has inherited a vast fortune and built for himself a giant folly in the veld, a magical place of fantasy and dreams that seduces Adam and transforms him absolutely, violently - and perhaps forever. Damon Galgut's magnificent new novel evokes a hot and cruel and claustrophobic world, in which sex and death are never far from the surface. It is his most powerful and unforgettable novel yet.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #93061 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Review
"'Damon Galgut's book is the best I have read to come out of the new South Africa.' Allan Massie, Scotsman * 'A gripping tale of secrecy and obsession set in the African savannah.' Sunday Telegraph 'This is a novel about a country's transition and its moral effects, and it is absolutely brilliant.' The Times 'In one sense, The Impostor is a conventional crime caper, the story of an innocent man who gets sucked into a world that he doesn't understand. In another, it is a critique of contemporary South Africa, a country that, as Galgut depicts it, is beset with cruelty and a spirit of brutish materialism. But there is a third level on which the novel works, that of the fable or parable... Galgut's plots seem propelled by a logic of their own.' William Skidelsky, Observer 'Outstanding... [Galgut is] a major writer worthy to be referred to as a kindred spirit of the great Coetzee... The Impostor, with its bleak balancing of boyhood hopes and adult regret, is a great novel.' Eileen Battersby, Irish Times 'Spellbinding' Thomas Jones, Sunday Telegraph"

Allan Massie, Scotsman
`Damon Galgut's book is the best I have read to come out of the new South Africa.'

Eileen Battersby, Irish Times
`Outstanding... [Galgut is] a major writer worthy to be referred to as a kindred spirit of the great Coetzee... A great novel.'

Customer Reviews

You can't outrun your past
The Impostor is Damon Galgut's fifth novel and his second obvious Booker contender, after The Good Doctor (2003). Like its predecessor, The Impostor is a dark, gripping, not-quite-real parable of the South African Karoo. But, for my money, it surpasses The Good Doctor emphatically.

Adam Napier is a down-and-out, a redundant office worker who moves to the country in the hope of writing poetry. But his quiet life is quickly turned upside-down by a chance meeting with Canning, a local landowner. Canning takes Adam under his wing, purporting to be his long-lost school friend - but Adam has no memory of him. Galgut struggles to keep this Father Ted plotline within the bounds of plausibility but (I think) succeeds. Canning invites Adam to his enormous game park (a kind of Jurassic Park without the dinosaurs), where (it soon transpires) shady business deals are in the offing.

The world of The Impostor is a world in which everyone (including Adam) is working towards the obliteration of history. Every character - the whole town, it seems - has a mysterious past they would like to forget. Canning even hopes to obliterate the landscape of his game park: it reminds him too much of his hated father. But, through a series of clever plot twists, Galgut hammers home a simple message: the past will come back to haunt you. What goes around comes around. South Africa as a nation may want to forget the past, but it's not that easy. At the book's dramatic finale, Adam faces a crossroads and a clear choice: will he risk his own life to protect someone else, despite their past crimes? Can a person ever have a right to a fresh start? Such questions are timely and important.

Galgut's writing is strikingly minimal: description & dialogue & no frills. He'd easily bag the John Smith's Award for No Nonsense Prose. He gets away with it because, with only a few broad brush strokes, he paints a remarkably vivid supporting cast. Everyone who reads The Good Doctor remembers the Brigadier. The Impostor is packed with similarly memorable figures: Canning, whose inadequacies are hidden behind a cocky facade; Baby, Canning's scheming wife, smothered in bright makeup like a doll; the Mayor, whose hyperactivity hides his corruptibility; and Blom, Adam's paranoid neighbour, who communicates his mental anguish through metalwork sculptures. It's a shame Adam himself is bland by comparison.

Galgut now stands at a similar point in his career to that at which J.M. Coetzee stood when he wrote Life & Times of Michael K (1983). Galgut deserves similar acclaim, and I hope his career follows the same stratospheric trajectory as that of the Nobel prizewinner to whom his style is so clearly indebted.

pulling up the weeds
In Damon Galgut's powerful new novel the juxtaposition of old and new is made all too clear, but also the meeting of Past with Present (and Future), Nature with Man and, within it's uniquely South African context, black with white. As the capital letters indicate it is a novel filled with metaphor and the kind of symbolic writing more commonly found in the short story. Although only 250 (small) pages long it crams so much in I found it one of the most satisfying reads of the year.

We meet two brothers Adam and Gavin Napier. Adam, usually the stable, dependable one has seen a change in his fortunes, replaced at work by a younger black colleague and drifting aimlessly whilst his brother has become a successful property developer for whom only the cheapest fittings will do. Adam is offered the opportunity to stay in his brother's place in the country, an almost derelict house with a tin roof, in order to pursue a dream from his youth; to write poetry. Choked by tough old weeds (which he is ordered to remove by the local Mayor) this is far from a country retreat, until recently it was literally the end of the road, and it isn't long before the isolation begins to take its toll.

'On that first day, when he'd arrived, he'd felt time flowing in through the front door behind him. He'd brought time back into the house. But now he could feel a different time - old time, dead time - trapped inside, unable to pass back out, into the current. It had become shaped to the rooms, looping back on itself, piling up in compacted layers so dense and heavy that they were almost substantial. It didn't seem implausible that people or actions from long ago might be here, very close to him.'

This makes tangible the major theme of ever-present history. His one neighbour is a man with a huge secret in his past and Adam himself is soon confronted by his own when he hears his cruel nickname, 'Nappy', being called out ('It is astounding how much history can be stored up in two syllables'). The man calling to him, Channing, purports to be an old school friend although Adam has no recollection of him whatsoever. First through embarrassment and then through the high regard he is clearly held in, he keeps up his pretence of recognition and finds himself being welcomed into Channing's life, his new-found good fortune. Away from the arrid wilderness of the karoo Channing presides over a verdant paradise, an improbable micro-climate in the valley of a mountain developed by his father to be a game park. He lives there with his coloured wife, Baby, '...an emblematic female figure, seen against the backdrop of a primal, primitive garden. All of it is very biblical', a point only reinforced by the arrival into this garden of Adam (Galgut's symbols aren't always subtle). He hopes that this will be the right enviroment for nurturing his poetic impulses; he literally follows the course of all the surrounding life to its wellspring and feels his writer's block lifting but it is the increasing number of encounters with Baby, the 'amoral Beauty', that feed his creativity. Channing seems to be quite happy to push them together whilst he gets on with his business, the uneasy relationships between all three of them being tested all the time by this proximity.

When back in the karoo he is faced by those ever present weeds in the garden. Galgut loads them with significance, making it a Sisyphean task, even the water he uses to soften the ground around them to aid his labour works against him. New green shoots start to appear and as he pulls one up he realises it is 'months away from becoming the tough, thorny adversary he's been dealing with. But it will: the future is encoded in its cells. Generations of seeds are lying dormant under the surface, waiting for his labours to release them. The very means of clearing the yard is what will fill it again.'

This kind of metaphysical enquiry and his own indignation at the behaviour of others around him distracts Adam from his own moral failings as he gets drawn deeper and deeper into Channing's own schemes, where the future is to be built on the foundations of revenge for his past. There is almost the air of a thriller about the plotting, albeit one with moral ambiguity and philosophical musings. This helps keep the energy up in a book whose themes could have become leaden. Galgut gives one the sense that whilst the situation in South Africa isn't hopeless it is one in which the various participants are starting some way apart. Truth and Reconciliation, two more capitalised words, were the foundation of South Africa's new beginning, and still it seems an important part of its future. Galgut has placed himself at the forefront of articulating that process and this book should cement his status as the most exciting writer of his generation.

Chorus of Impostors
This is a beautifully written, bleak and unsettling book. As I got lured into its heart, I realised that far from 'The Impostor' being singular, almost the entire cast of characters were portraying deception, hiding behind masks, and pretending to be other than they were, in some way.

This novel, set in South Africa post apartheid, looks at the still colonial nature of society as pitilessly as the hot sun in that landscape, illuminating with a harsh light and casting deep shadows. As another reviewer has noted, there is something Kafka-esque, in the sense of shadowy, never really evident state machinations taking place and with the little individuals like ants, puny and helpless.

The book charts brilliantly the moral decline of the central character, and also shows how events in anyone's life, which may be utterly insignificant to one, can almost set the wheels of fate implacably in motion for another - the final revelation of the source of the two central character's friendship, of enormous significance to Canning, an unremembered, unremarkable moment for Adam