Vigil by George Saunders – Book Review

Modern master of the short story George Saunders found commercial and critical success with his first full-length novel, the wonderfully experimental Lincoln in the Bardo (2017). It follows Abraham Lincoln’s son, Willie, who’s trapped in the ‘bardo’, a Buddhist-inspired domain between life and rebirth, along with a vast cast of fretful spirits.

With his new novel, Vigil, Saunders returns to this (albeit slightly altered) liminal realm for an A Christmas Carol-esque tale of spectral visitations. Our narrator is the ghost – though the author makes pains to avoid the term – of Jill ‘Doll’ Blaine, a telephone operator and sometimes waitress from the American Midwest, who died in a rather unfortunate way at 22. After apparently transcending the petty concerns of her mortal life, she now exists in the bardo, driven by a singular purpose: to comfort the dying and ease their transition into the hereafter.

Her latest ‘charge’ is the uber-successful but obstinate K.J. Boone, CEO of the world’s largest oil firm and an early climate change denier. Boone gaslit the world, both literally and figuratively, spending decades commissioning bogus research and spreading misinformation about the catastrophic effects of fossil fuels to secure a profitable future for his industry.

Despite Boone’s long list of sins, when ghost-Jill hurtles down from the heavens to his Dallas mansion – where the now-octogenarian lies unresponsive in his deathbed – she senses none of the doubts and regrets that usually plague her charges in their final hours. As she ‘enters the orb of his thoughts’ (a kind of mild-meld that allows beings in the bardo to communicate directly through thoughts and memories), she finds a man consumed by smug self-assurance of his accomplishments. ‘Pigheaded,’ as one character later describes him, ‘with an astonishingly limited capacity for self-examination’.

As the Southern summer evening wears on, Boone is visited by a motley crew of characters – both real and imagined, living and dead – all seeking a sort of reckoning. Among them is the spectre of a Frenchman, obviously inspired by Étienne Lenoir, inventor of the internal combustion engine (though not acknowledged as such): a tragicomic figure whose afterlife mission is to confront those who, like him, have sinned against the natural world, and force them to face their misdeeds with ‘contrition, shame, and self-loathing’.

Jill, being a self-described ‘elevated’ entity, holds a more detached, deterministic view of Boone, insisting that he, like everyone else, could only have been exactly who he was, given the particular person he was born as and the circumstances he was thrust into. As the Frenchman urges Boone to take responsibility and repent, Jill encourages him to join her in a state of elevation by relinquishing his ‘self’ – that pesky thing to which all his pain, blame, and shame are attached. But Boone, unable to face his sins and unwilling to give up the intoxicating experience of being himself – a man who ‘called a king and a king picked up’ – resists them both, forcing the ghosts to seek ever-escalatory tactics to win his soul.