Lincoln In The Bardo

George Saunders has long been accepted as one of the masters of the American short novel, one of the novel’s conceits is that by occupying the same space, the spirits can experience a dissolution of interpersonal boundaries, understanding and feeling sympathy for each other in a mystical way. It is hard to be specific without spoiling the plot, but Saunders uses this device to imply a cause for Lincoln’s later signing of the emancipation proclamation, a move that seems glib and reductive, a blemish on a book that otherwise largely manages to avoid sentiment and cliche. This is a small quibble. Lincoln in the Bardo is a performance of great formal daring. It perhaps won’t be to everyone’s taste, but minor issues aside it stands head and shoulders above most contemporary fiction, showing a writer who is expanding his universe outwards, and who clearly has many more pleasures to offer his readers.

George Saunders’s much-awaited first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, is like a weird folk art diorama of a cemetery come to life. Saunders’ novel is at its most potent and compelling when it is focused on Lincoln, a grave, deeply compassionate figure, burdened by both personal grief and the weight of the war, and captured here in the full depth of his humanity. In fact, it is Saunders’ beautifully realized portrait of Lincoln – caught at this hinge moment in time, in his own personal bardo, as it were – that powers this book over its more static sections and attests to the author’s own fruitful transition from the short story to the long-distance form of the novel.

As far back as 2004, the American writer George Saunders admitted he ‘sometimes’ felt pressure to turn from short stories to a novel. A US headline a few years ago put it more bluntly, ‘George Saunders Needs to Write a Goddamn Novel Already’. So now we have it, his first novel. Is Lincoln in the Bardo some kind of sprawling, multithreaded, speculative future America? Not exactly. Instead, he’s taken a left turn into the past for a historical novel like no other. How this plays out in the novel is a tricky matter. Saunders gives us a barrel-load of his typically bizarre conceits, but to what end? Willie’s fate after death is plainly meant to be the focus, but the jeopardies on offer are drama-drainingly opaque and finnicky to the point of equivalence.

This is George Saunders’ first novel, and it has been thirstily anticipated. Since his debut collection of stories, in 1996, his blend of satire, sentiment and linguistic sensibility has made him one of the most acclaimed short-fiction writers in English. The language in Saunders’ stories is intense, with little breathing space. He admires sentences that have ‘been the subject of so much concentration, they have become a thing in the world.’ So 350 pages of uninterrupted Saunders might be exhausting. Fortunately, it isn’t, Lincoln in the Bardo is a breeze, although that is not an unqualified compliment. Much of Saunders’ work shows how people use words to obscure rather than explain, and his language is typically compact and coded as a result.