Vigil by George Saunders

Hang on a minute, isn’t this Lincoln in the Bardo repackaged for the age of climate consciousness?

Oil tycoon K.J. Boone is on his deathbed when Jill “Doll” Blaine crashes down to earth to help her latest charge on his journey to the afterlife. While Boone thinks that he has nothing to regret after a long and successful life in the oil industry others, alive and dead, disagree. His smooth passage, with Jill’s help, is interrupted while we reconsider the evidence.

Jill Blaine’s arrival on the scene begins the book, her arms, legs and feet all becoming more substantial as she plummets towards a driveway complete with a fountain and statue of a golden dog:

I observed all of this as I plummeted past and then my head and torso pierced the asphalt crust of a semi-circular drive and lodged in the dirt below.

My rear was in the air, my fresh legs bicycling energetically. I found myself alternatively clothed and unclothed. That is to say: one instant naked and the next clothed. Or to be more precise: partly clothed. (Over time, that is, the elements of my outfit grew more reliably visible.)

My beige skirt soon became near constant.

Meanwhile, here was a burrowing worm to consider and a brown bottle-shard and the rich smell of the loam now completely encasing my (inverted) upper half.

What happens next is that having located her charge, Jill floats into his consciousness and begins to comfort him towards his final moments:

Moving closer, I entered the orb of his thoughts.

Within him abided a formidable stubbornness. A steady flow of satisfaction, even triumph, coursed through him, regarding all that he had managed to do, see, cause, and create, especially given his humble origins.

I scanned for doubts regarding things he had done or left undone; things he might have said but had not; mistakes to which he had not yet fully admitted, any of which might keep him from attaining that state of total peace so to be desired at this juncture.

And found nothing, or nearly nothing.

He was as sure of himself as ever a charge of mine had been.

Even now, as the terrible illness overtook him.

You could probably call it a day at that point, on page four, and predict what was about to happen over the next 168 pages. Chances are you would be right. Lots of other spirits, ghosts if you like, come to tell K.J. Boone that he was not the wonderful person he thought he was. Old school friends, and enemies, business partners and advisors, lawyers, even his mother and father, come and go over the pages to tell us that Boone paid for fake science reports to make his oil exploration look harmless, paid for that fake science to be promoted in the newspapers, and saw nothing wrong because he was giving jobs to so many people, and helping each one to go about their life, by car and bus, which they would not be able to do without his oil company. At one point, his bedroom is filled with birds, all dead or extinct, because of the damage his life’s work had done to the environment.

So what else do we get? Well, the only endearing feature seems to be Jill. From time to time, exasperated with her charge, she pops into the neighbour’s garden where a wedding is taking place. She enjoys the joy of those who are there, reads their minds, and this begins to remind her of her own short life. Gradually, we learn that she was only 22 when she died, and then we learn that she died because her car was blown to pieces with her in it. She had changed cars for the day with her husband, who was a police deputy. The bomb was not meant for her at all.

In many ways, Jill’s past was far less predictable than that of K.J. Boone. Thank goodness. It gives us a little light relief.

Reviewer: Marcus Hobson

Bloomsbury Publishing