More than literary conceit
This clever and stylish novel is also a triumphant piece of storytelling, says Kelly Ana Morey.
The year is 1862, the American Civil War is about to enter its second year, and US President Abraham Lincoln is already facing calamity politically when his beloved son, Willie, succumbs to typhoid fever.
History has it that insensate with grief Lincoln went to visit his son’s body in its crypt at Georgetown Cemetery in the days immediately after Willie’s death. From this fragment, American short story writer George Saunders has created his first novel.
Willie is caught between realms in a limbo that Tibetans call Bardo. A type of waiting room that’s populated by a shifting population that reflects the living world with all its prejudices and hierarchies of privilege and lack.
Lincoln’s visit to his son’s body, which he pulls from the crypt and holds, causes Willie to become something of a cause celebre in this afterlife, pulling a host of garrulous ghosts from the shadows. But if they want to tell Willie their stories they’ll have to make it quick, because Willie is a child so won’t last long in this twilight world.
What makes this novel such a delight is how it’s written. It’s almost entirely constructed from scraps of dialogue contributed by the various characters in each of the short scenes. It’s like a play, more specifically it’s like a Samuel Beckett play. The dialogue that is there is to advance action, provide back story and build character.
There are two main characters besides Willie, who become his spirit guides: Roger Bevins III, a suicide, and Hans Vollman, who died from a head injury caused by a falling beam. These two, Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon by any other name, narrate the history of the Bardo and some of its inhabitants in their own particular way, with a little bit of help from a
Elan Mastai’s debut novel is an electrifying sci-fi read that has as much to say about the world we live in as a world imagined. All Our Wrong Todays is not a novel of alternative worlds but of alternative timelines.
In a nutshell, you get to see the world’s development from point X, and then you get to see the world’s development from point X, if someone travels back in time and contaminates an event.
It is 2016. Tom Barren is not that smart. He comes from the world ‘‘we were supposed to have’’ instead of ‘‘the crappy world we do have’’.
His father has three PhDs and is an expert at teleportation. His mother likes old-fashioned books with paper and ink and does everything to make the father’s life flow smoothly. Penelope wants to be a deep-space astronaut but fails on her first short mission. Tom is obsessed with her.
The world no longer needs manual labourers; the key industry is entertainment. Everything else is taken care of.
Lured by the idea of time-travel tourism, Victor Barren has invented a time machine and wants to test it by going back to 1965 to check out what went wrong with Lionel Goettreider’s spectacular invention.
His energy machine – unlimited and clean – harnesses power from the motion of the planet and does succeed, eventually. It is indeed responsible for the automated world where people are rich in leisure time.
After a sequence of calamities, Tom ends up being the time traveller and finding himself stuck in the revised world, our imperfect world, where the new versions of himself, his father, his mother and Penelope seem so much more lovable.
His mother is no longer ‘‘midwife to large cast of characters who inhabit various strata within this strange liminal realm.
Like Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, black humour and the celebration of the absurd are central to Lincoln in the Bardo and these two elements, combined with the superb writing, stop the novel’s unusual construction from being a quirky literary conceit. Especially when you consider Saunders has thrown out most of the tools and devices beloved by novelists. In less sure hands it could have been a disaster, instead it’s actually pretty triumphant.
In addition to the scenes in the Bardo are a number of small chapters of quirky quotes from various sources that provide a glimpse into the living world on the other side of the cemetery fence. One of these chapters contains differing accounts of what the moon was up to on the night of young Willie’s death.
Lincoln in the Bardo is indubitably a clever and stylish novel, but it’s also a highly entertaining one. his father’s genius’’. Tom teeters on the edge of an ethical precipice: should he stay in the cosier imperfect world where love abounds or head back in time to rescue the ‘‘ideal’’ world?
The book is compulsive reading and is as neatly constructed as an intricate jigsaw puzzle. The narrator is cheeky; he warns you about what is coming up to avoid narrative subterfuge and provides little recaps which you don’t really need. But I like his presence, especially the way he draws in ideas and sticky questions.
One example: when you invent a new technology you also invent its accident (courtesy of Paul Virilio). Thus: the car and car accidents, nuclear fusion and nuclear meltdowns, Goettreider’s machine and a unique and deadly radiation.
Tom’s quest, through time and across physical zones, is also a philosophical quest as he figures out what to do. I am not sure that an ideal world governed by clean and limitless energy would produce such unlovable people, but this is fiction, and it is a spine-tingling, rollercoaster read. Such planet-forming detail. Such inventiveness. I loved it.