Dave's Book Blog: June 2026

Monday, 1 June 2026

"Vigil" by George Saunders

Saunders returns to the theme of his 2017 Booker winning Lincoln in the Bardo with this novel. Dead Jill returns to earth (as a ghost? an angel?) to comfort a dying man. During his life he was the CEO of one of the biggest oil extraction firms, responsible for a huge amount of climate change and also responsible for denying climate change even while (through his firms secret research) being aware it was happening and taking steps to mitigate the consequences for his company's profits. Even on his deathbed he is justifying himself, often to other ghosts summoned to accuse him by a dead Frenchman responsible for the invention of the 'machine'. Is he responsible or is he a helpless product of his genetic make-up and the circumstances of his upbringing? And can he manage to find peace before he passes over? Furthermore, can Jill, who seems to be doomed to repeat her task of comforting the dying until she too can be 'elevated' to a higher sphere?

If there is any philosophy behind this, it would seem to be the Buddhist idea that we are trapped on this earth, endlessly reincarnating, until we can learn to renounce the self and achieve, on death, nirvana, nothingness. In this book, ghosts, including Jill, are trapped as ghosts, until they can renounce the self and achieve 'elevation': "If your worth depends on your glories, it must also depend on your sins ...forswear the glory, forswear the culpability. The self is the culprit." (p 81)

The glory of this novel is the characters, almost all of them ghosts (again, this is very similar to LitB) and the imaginative whimsy used to create them. But Saunders also has the ability to nail images and ideas in remarkably simple, sometimes shocking, phrases.

Selected quotes:

"I made for the front door and, not yet walking competently, collapsed to the earth like a just-unstrung puppet" (p4)
"When you regretted, folks pounced. You were weak with regret, they felt it, they pounced." (p 39)
"From the wedding came a squeal of shock, as if something unthinkable but delightful had just been revealed to a previously demure matron." (p 67)
"A bottom-dweller has one bright, shining moment and can't help shit the bed about it." (p 93)
"Soon will come that special thunk made by: inert load, dropping ... After which, devoid of its former vitality, his sad former-person-bearing meatlump will begin to rot." (p 100)
"Sheet buttloads of senseless crap" (p 103)
"My charge had been born him. But he had never chosen to be born him. That had just happened to him. Then life had happened to that him, exerting upon it certain deleterious effects ... which had led him to strive, which, in turn, led him to accomplish, and, in accomplishing, he had brought about harm." (p 165)