This
novel by American academic George Saunders received the Man Booker prize last
year. And I should begin by saying that the reviews I have read – in The
Guardian, the New York Times, and the Globe and Mail – are
extremely positive. Lincoln in the Bardo received critical acclaim, and Time
magazine named Saunders, who teaches at Syracuse University, one of the 100
most influential people in the world.
Personally,
I found this avant-garde book a challenge to finish. These comments
explain why, but also why it makes sense to persevere.
There
are two things you need to know to understand this book. The first is that
Abraham Lincoln’s 11-year-old son Willie died of typhoid in 1962, as the
Civil War was raging and while his father was hosting a party downstairs in
the White House. The second is the notion of the Bardo, which in Tibetan
Buddhism is a transitional reality that people endure between death and
rebirth. It is a concept which arose soon after Gautama Buddha’s death in 545
BC. The Bardo is an intermediate state between death and rebirth, and a
central theme of one of the earliest Buddhist texts, the Tibetan Book of
the Dead.*
According
to Tibetan tradition, after death and before one’s next birth, when one’s
consciousness is not connected with a physical body, he or she experiences a
variety of phenomena. These usually follow a particular sequence of
degeneration. Just after death, the spirit has its clearest experiences of
reality. Eventually in the Bardo, you have hallucinations and nightmares. For
the lucky ones, it’s a place of transcendental insight. If that’s your
experience, you may be reincarnated as an enlightened one.
As
Saunders says in his copyright page, his book is “a work of historical
fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events and locales that
figure into the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are
products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.” The book takes
countless forms. In effect, it’s a collage of comments, dialogues and
opinions offered by spirits, ghosts and other spectres. The text looks a bit
like the pages of a printed play – but a play in which the ghosts are those
of loveless old men, abused women (most tragically, a “mulatto” woman, who
had been frequently raped), racists and suicides. The apparitions in this
book lived tragic lives or died tragic deaths, or both.
Many
voices contribute to the narrative – especially a trio of voices consisting
of a young gay man who killed himself after being rejected by his lover, an
elderly reverend and a middle-aged printer killed in an accident before he
could consummate his marriage to his young wife. There are moments of humour
in this book, and there are also moments of tragic insight. At one point a
character – I can’t remember which one – describes Willie Lincoln’s remains
as “meat.” That’s crude but appropriate, I think, once the spark of life has
left the body.
One
of the novel’s conceits is that by occupying the same space, the spirits can
experience dissolution of interpersonal boundaries, understanding and feeling
sympathy for each other in a mystical way. Among the book’s restless phantoms
are two who most closely resemble the story’s protagonists. Their names are
Hans Vollman and Roger Bevins III.
“When
the ghost of the young Willie Lincoln appears in the Bardo, these two and
sometimes their colleague, the Reverend Everly Thomas, attempt to liberate
the boy’s spirit from existence in the Bardo” John Semley wrote in a Globe
and Mail book review. “To do this, they must deliver the boy’s ghost to
Lincoln himself, uniting the boy’s spectral death-form with his father’s
physical body, as a way of easing his grief.”
Like
damned souls out of Dante, spirits appear hideous deformities, physical
analogues to their various moral failings, or the concerns that keep them
tethered to the world of the living. A woman who can’t let go of her three
daughters is oppressed by three glowing orbs. A miser has to “float
horizontally, like a human compass needle, the top of his head facing in the
direction of whichever of his properties he found himself most worried about
at the moment.”
In
one of the concluding chapters, a mob of spirits enter Lincoln’s body as he
strides through the cemetery. They wedge themselves into his mourning. And
the experience proves fruitful in the odd sense that it deepens Lincoln’s
sense of mourning. “He had not, it seemed, gone unaffected by that event. Not
at all. It had made him sad. Sadder. We had. All of us, white and black, had
made him sadder, with our sadness.” The notion, according to Semley, is “that
sadness teaches us compassion, our misery making us more mindful of others.”
As I
mentioned at the beginning of these remarks, this book is unusual and, given
its plethora of voices, difficult to follow. After I’d finished the book and
started to read the reviews, I downloaded the audiobook, which uses a
different person to voice of the book’s 166 different characters. I didn’t
and won’t listen to the whole book, but I wish I had done it this way in the
beginning.
*
Buddha left no written texts behind. The many Buddhist documents attributed
to him were composed after his death. Groups of monks kept them alive through
chanting before scribes eventually put pen to paper and wrote them down.
