George Saunders is back in the Bardo – perhaps stuck there. Vigil, his first novel since 2017’s Booker prize‑winning Lincoln in the Bardo, returns to that indeterminate space between life and death, comedy and grief, moral inquiry and narrative hijinks. Once again, the living are largely absent, and the dead are meddlesome and chatty. They have bones to pick.
They converge at the deathbed of an oil man, KJ Boone. He’s a postwar bootstrapper: long-lived, filthy rich and mightily pleased with himself. “A steady flow of satisfaction, even triumph, coursed through him, regarding all he had managed to see, cause and create.” Boone is calm in his final hours, enviably so. He seems destined to die exactly as he lived, untroubled by self-reflection. But as his body falters, his mind becomes permeable to ghosts, and they have work to do. The tycoon has profited handsomely from climate denial, and there is still time for him to acknowledge his fossil-fuelled sins before the lights go out.
Our narrator, Jill Blaine, is a spectral death doula. She has helped hundreds of souls ease their way out of their bodies, and she’s good at it, in part because no one did the job for her (her own ending was … explosive). But Boone is a thorny, unrepentant fellow; certain of his own brilliance, and his exemption from the petty scruples of “mere earthlings”. What is the doula’s role here: to comfort the dying man, or correct the moral record? When does mercy become complicity?
Reading Vigil in the wake of Christmas does it no favours. The ingredients here are unavoidably Dickensian: a crotchety old bastard, ghostly visitations, and a soul (or two) on the line. Is KJ Boone an Anthropocene version of Ebenezer Scrooge? If so, Saunders has forgotten something elemental about that Victorian wretch: we end up rooting for him. That was the wager of A Christmas Carol, and the source of its enduring and radical comfort. If Scrooge could change, maybe we could too.
Boone is different. He can’t undo his damage with a roast turkey and a pay rise. He has helped to damn the planet, and so we watch in the hope – the expectation – that he’ll be damned in return. That is our vigil.
We will meet his sneering daughter (“recovered from her brief, friend-induced flirtation with libtarditude”); we will meet his cowed wife. By the time Boone takes his final breaths, we will have no doubt that he is what we think he is: “a bully, a ruiner, an unrepentant world-wrecker”. Comeuppance is an empty, ghoulish business and that may be Saunders’s point. But there is little moral work to do here: Boone has earned his fate (the arrogant brute is likely to agree), and compassion is its own kind of punishment. Whatever Jill decides – whatever we decide – can be made to feel righteous.
It is a vigilantist fantasy: that if we could just identify and eliminate the right corporate monsters, the ledger might balance. Billionaires and CEOs make excellent villains; some even seem to relish the role. But cut one down and another couple sprout in their place; an economic hydra. That’s the real monstrosity. The climate crisis doesn’t have a satisfying antagonist because the violence is structural, pervasive and monstrously ordinary. Vigil circles this idea, but never escapes Boone’s gravitational pull.
Yet Jill “Doll” Blaine is the far more interesting creature. In order to tend to others – 343 charges to date – the death doula has forgotten herself: her past, her end, even her name. As Boone is dying, a wedding is under way next door, and the merry noise of it unsettles her careful amnesia. Her own love story returns, but to remember it is to relive its end. Somewhere in a lonely attic, the doula’s own wedding dress moulders. How terrifyingly lonely it is to be forgotten. Much easier to do the forgetting yourself.
This is where Saunders’s ghosts do their most persuasive work. Not as blunt moral instruments, but as unfinished souls. Lincoln in the Bardo narrowed history to a single, intimate calamity: Abraham Lincoln holding the body of his dead son through one last long night. By staying with the specificity of loss – the weight of the boy in his father’s arms – the book let Lincoln be more than a grand American allegory. He was pried loose from symbolic duty and returned to the human realm of love and loss. History was watching, but Saunders did not allow it a final say. The archival scraps he included contradicted one another. The only truth left standing was the grief itself: private, incontrovertible, sufficient.
In Vigil, the spectral shenanigans are starting to feel like a gimmick: the polyphonic jibber-jabber, the Beckettian riddling, the poo and fart jokes (Saunders loves a bawdy, gassy ghost; a pile of phantom faeces). What once felt anarchic has hardened into habit; a repertoire of tricks and tics. They’re being used to stage a lesson for us – and it grates, to be trapped in someone else’s morality play. A readerly Bardo.
• Vigil by George Saunders is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
