Vigil by George Saunders

George Saunders has been writing novels for a long time but hit the big time with his book Lincoln in the Bardo which won the 2017 Booker Prize. That novel was mainly set in the “bardo” a Tibetan concept of a state between life and death in which spirits roam. Saunders returns to the bardo for his latest novel Vigil. Although Vigil is much more modern and has some more immediate concerns.

Jill “Doll” Blaine is a sort of spirit guide. She comes to people when they are about to die and helps them to come to terms with their life, their impending death and what might happen next. Blaine herself is a bit of a lost soul, having been killed over fifty years before while still young and never seeming to have really revisited that event or its consequences. Her subject in Vigil is Texas oilman KJ Boone. Booke has spent his life not only profiting hugely from fossil fuels but actively repressing or refuting information about climate change, all the while knowing that it may be a problem, just not his problem. Blaine’s work, along with a host of other restless spirits is to help Boone recognise the error of his ways, only Boone is having none of it and actively refuses to change.

There is a temptation to compare this book to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, where a character is visited by spirits and given the opportunity to reflect on his life. But at least in that case Scrooge still had time to change. Given Boone is clearly dying and the damage has been done, it is never clear what the purpose of a deathbed confession or change of heart would actually achieve.

Saunders is tries to not be too didactic or preachy in Vigil but is not always successful. He wears his heart on his sleeve and his feelings fairly obvious both through his recounting of episodes from Boone’s life and characters like Boone’s right-wing daughter. Readers who understand the damage that the fossil fuel industry has done to the practice of science in its attempts to shore-up profits are likely to feel vindicated. They will also know that while Boone is emblematic he would have been far from the single cause of this disinformation campaign. But it is far from likely that anybody who is already in denial (even when multiple hypocrisies and deliberate obfuscations are made evident to them) will be convinced by this.

One of the ghosts who haunts Boone appears to be Étienne Lenoir, the French inventor of the internal combustion engine in the mid 19^th century (although he is never named in the book). The idea is that Lenoir would be one of the ghosts leading the prosecution against Boone, as someone feeling some responsibility for our current predicament. But it is unclear why this person from history would still be hanging around, tormenting those who oversaw fossil fuel extraction. Saunders could just as easily have used the inventor of the coal fired steam engine, given the contribution of coal burning to climate change.

Blaine’s personal story is more interesting and poignant than Boone’s but it is unclear why it has taken her over 50 years to revisit the circumstances around her own death and what happened next.

Saunders did well using a ghostly setting for his award-winning novel. He has not been nearly as successful using this conceit a second time. Vigil feels more like a jump on the climate-related fiction bandwagon – the sort of book that does not go any further than highlighting the issue. Boone almost epitomises the problem that the world faces – that those who created the problem and worked actively to hide its impacts are going to be dead long before those impacts are fully felt. But, flawed as it is, Vigil has the advantage of being a novel by a Booker Prize winner so it may bring in people who have not actively considered these issues before. And f it manages to change the attitudes of some readers, or makes them rethink what they thought they knew, then that can only be a positive.

Vigil by George Saunders

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6.0/10