Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders - review

Saunders's imagination is in service of a tender heart, says Johanna Thomas-Corr
Tragic death: a portrait of Abraham Lincoln by George Healy that hangs in the White House
DeAgostini/Getty Images

Seven score and 15 years ago, as the American Civil War escalated, President Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary lost their third son, William. Willie was a blond-haired, chubby-cheeked 11-year-old who caught a fever and, after two weeks of horrendous suffering, died of typhoid on February 20, 1862.

According to reports Lincoln was so grief-stricken that he visited the crypt in Washington’s Oak Hill Cemetery, alone and at night, to open Willie’s casket and cradle his body. It’s this image that inspires George Saunders’s first full-length novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, a surreal metaphysical drama about grief and freedom.

Saunders, 58, is widely admired for his virtuosic short stories, which often read like postmodern morality tales. Here he has produced a father-son narrative that is both hilarious and haunting.

The action takes place over one night in Willie’s cemetery, where spirits unable to accept their deaths loiter around the boy’s crypt, watching in awe as the long-limbed president grieves. These wraiths exist in a kind of limbo called “bardo”, a concept borrowed from Tibetan Buddhism (Saunders is an adherent) which refers to a transitional state of consciousness between death and rebirth.

It is among these spirits that Willie now finds himself — and they form a quarrelsome polyphony of the night Willie was interred, with stories to tell about race, sex, death, freedom, captivity: America, essentially.

His principal companions are Roger Bevins III, a young gay man who slit his wrists and who now appears with extra eyes and hands, and Hans Vollman, a printer who was hit on the head by a falling beam on the day his teenage wife hoped to consummate their marriage. He wanders around naked with an erect penis.

At the time of Willie’s death, America was an experiment close to failing and Lincoln was at his most unpopular. As the president accepts his son’s death and faces up to the national tragedy, he sees “his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather, its like had been felt, would yet be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated, because, in this state, he could be of no help to anyone”.

Did Lincoln’s acceptance of his boy’s death galvanise him to win the war? Debatable. But in Saunders’s story it has a tang of authenticity that is in keeping with the author’s moral outlook — that once we understand that at the core of all humans lies suffering, we begin to attain spiritual wisdom.

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From taunting us with images of a hell, full of Hieronymus Bosch-style horrors, to exploring the agonising regrets of a foreshortened life, Saunders doesn’t allow his readers to rest on sentimental ideas of “being in a better place” once we die. When Bevins slashes his wrists: “Only then (nearly out the door, so to speak) did I realise how unspeakably beautiful all of this was, how precisely engineered for our pleasure...”

Saunders forces us to confront the strangeness of our own existence — that we must live knowing that we and everyone we love will die. But his dark imagination is in service of a tender heart (at times, his fiction reads a little like A Christmas Carol by way of Samuel Beckett). In the novel’s most beguiling passages, the dead souls recall “the things of the world” and their sensuous qualia: “a friendly match-share beneath some collision-tilted streetlight; a frozen clock, bird-visited within its high tower; cold water from a tin jug; towelling off one’s clinging shirt post–June rain… someone’s kind wishes for you; someone remembering to write; someone noticing that you are not at all at ease”.

Saunders returns us to the world afresh with an idea that is both difficult and joyful: there is life before death.

£14.38, Wordery, Buy it now

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