George Saunders, the Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo, has returned with Vigil, a surreal, polarising novella that has left critics sharply divided, per bbc.com.
The story follows Jill Blaine, a spirit sent to earth to console KJ Boone, a dying oil tycoon and staunch climate change denier. Described by some as an environmental answer to Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the book’s unconventional structure has triggered a wave of conflicting reviews. The Los Angeles Times hailed it as a “virtuoso achievement,” while London’s The Times dismissed it as “hysterical gibberish.”
Speaking to the BBC, Saunders admitted the work is intentionally ambiguous. “It will cause a certain feeling in the reader, ranging from delight to extreme frustration,” he noted.
Much like his previous success, Vigil occupies a “liminal space” between life and death. The narrative explores the tension between three central figures, KJ Boone, Jill Blaine and The French Inventor.
Saunders explains that the inspiration came during a week of “wacky” weather. He wanted to explore whether a person who invested their life in a destructive mission could “make an accommodation in the 11th hour.”
For Saunders, the novel isn’t meant to solve the climate crisis but to “formulate” the moral problems surrounding it. Drawing on his Buddhist faith and John Keats’s concept of “negative capability,” Saunders avoids a traditional redemption arc. Instead, he asks a difficult question: how much compassion do we owe the unrepentant?
“The world is so much bigger than my ability to understand it, yet I’m always acting as if I 100% understand it,” Saunders said. “To me, it’s a little bit sacramental to go, ‘Oh, my actual everyday self is a little bit flawed.'”
Despite the “absurd” label some critics have attached to its eccentric style, proponents argue that Vigil’s complexity, much like the initial mixed reception of Dickens, is exactly what will ensure its longevity as a modern masterpiece.
•Featured image: George Saunders/Zach Krahmer
