Book Corner – September 2017 (1)
Lincoln In The Bardo – George Saunders
It is very rare, in my experience, for a book to live up to its media hype but that is certainly the case with Saunders’ first full-length novel – he previously had made his name as a writer of short stories.
This is a wonderful book which operates on a number of levels. Ostensibly, it tells the story of what happened when Abraham Lincoln lost his Willie, his eleven year old son who probably died from typhoid. Willie died in February 1862 in an upstairs bedroom whilst the Lincolns were holding a state function on the ground floor. The couple never really recovered from their loss, Mary retreated to her bed, couldn’t bear to attend the funeral and spent a long period of her life under sedation. Abe was President at the time and in the middle of the Civil War with death tolls mounting, the prospects of success uncertain and the cares of state weighing heavily on him.
To make sense of the book readers need to be aware that the bardo, according to Tibetan Buddhist belief, is that transitional state between your past life and your future life, a sort of limbo. The characters we meet in the bardo, particularly two of the principal narrators, Hans Vollman who longs for the pleasures of his unconsummated marriage bed postponed as a result of a freak accident, and Roger Bevins, who committed suicide and instantly regretted it, fervently believe that it is only a matter of time before they are allowed to return to their former lives. With the innocent naivety of a child, Willie realises that this is bunkum and that they are dead and will remain dead for eternity.
The handling of Abe’s grief and the scenes where he revisits Willie’s tomb and cannot resist the temptation of lifting him from the casket is powerful and moving as is the scene where Lincoln senior is possessed by the inmates of the bardo and persuaded to walk away from the cemetery and return to life.
There are occasional raiding parties of the dead, trying to round up stragglers to move them on from their limbo-like existence. The bardo is full of picaresque characters, all with a tale to tell – abused slaves, priapic young men, wasters, drinkers, doting mothers, the whole gallimaufry of human life. We almost drown in the cacophony of hopeful, desperate and ultimately deluded voices. My favourite character is the elderly reverend who has a knowing way about him and clearly has a greater appreciation of the meaning of the bardo than his compatriots.
But what is mind-blowing is the style and structure of the book. It is rather like a patchwork quilt with contributions from each of the characters, interspersed with extracts from contemporary and post factum accounts, presumably all genuine, although I haven’t bothered to trace each source. Unlike a play, the character to whom the remarks are attributed or the source from which the passage is extracted appears afterwards. At first, this seems quite disconcerting as you are not quite sure who or what is saying what but you soon get used to the cadences of their speech and their perspective. The effect is astonishing as it gives the sense of a babble of voices, cutting in and interjecting as they do in real, or perhaps in this instance unreal, life. This literary conceit adds immeasurably to the sense that you are reading a great piece of literature and one that surely will stand the test of time.
Filed under: Books, Culture Tagged: Abraham Lincoln, bardo, George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo, Tibetan Buddhists and the bardo, what is a bardo, Willie Lincoln
