I come from a background in theatre, and the breaking of the fourth wall is a device by now quite well established. Your novel addresses the reader with implied knowledge of them. Of course, it has to be credible and authentic as well as surprising, and that ain’t so easy. Even on the level of a sentence, you should try to end up somewhere unpredictable. I understood that to mean you have to continually wrong-foot your reader, by never going where it seems you might. I read an interview with Tom Stoppard a long time ago which kept coming back to me during the writing, in which he spoke about ambushing the audience. And in a more secondary way, the structure had to be continually surprising. The experience of reading it had to be pleasurable on the simplest, most immediate level, which is to say through the use of words. It seemed to me that language was the answer. 'I like books that require a bit of work from the reader, too' What became the real challenge was how to hold a reader’s attention, given the segmented structure. You’re seeing the same family at different points in time over four decades, and a lot happens in the spaces between. There was no section of the book more challenging than any other, since it’s not a plot-driven novel. What was the hardest part of writing The Promise? All of this was liberating and exciting, and cause for great anxiety. The voice of the book also moves forward continuously, without a break, in the same way a film runs on to its end. I carried over a few other conventions from cinema too, such as cutting from one character to another without a break, or moving away from the main action to some arbitrary event happening on the sidelines. I realised that there was another way to deal with the narrative that I could move fluidly in and out of scenes in the same way a movie camera does. Then by chance I put the book aside to do a couple of drafts of a film script, and that diversion changed the way I saw my novel. In fact, I began with a much more formal, traditional approach, but that quickly became frustrating. It became crucial, but didn’t start out that way. Why did that feel crucial to telling this story? Soap opera over politics any day! Aesthetics over ideology! The narrative voice inhabits the minds of almost all of the book’s characters at various points. I was, I am, much more interested in the family and their internal dynamics. But in truth I’m somewhat surprised that this aspect of the novel has overshadowed everything else, because for me it was more of a background theme, a recurring motif I could work through the four sections of the book. It’s the burning question at the centre of South African life: who owns the land? Obviously that issue goes back to the day the first Europeans set foot here.

'I could move fluidly in and out of scenes in the same way a movie camera does'

Damon galgut the promise