bar·do
bärdō/ noun
1. (in Tibetan Buddhism) a state of existence between death and rebirth, varying in length according to a person's conduct in life and manner of, or age at, death.
All were in sorrow, or had been, or soon would be. It was the nature of things. Though on the surface it seemed every person was different, this was not true. At the core of each lay suffering; our eventual end, the many losses we must experience on the way to that end. We must try to see one another in this way. As suffering, limited beings – perennially outmatched by circumstance, inadequately endowed with compensatory graces.I read enough that it often feels like I'm encountering the same book over and over. Starved for novelty, I nevertheless balk at those po-mo stylists who embrace novelty for novelty's sake; straining my brain only to discover that their work doesn't have much to say beneath the tricks. Enter Lincoln in the Bardo: Told in a wholly unique mode, we find a blend of fact and fiction, the personal and the universal, grief, and love, and humanity. This is everything – everything – I hope to find in a book.
Author George Saunders was inspired by a true historical fact: In the weeks after his beloved son, Willie, died of typhoid fever in February of 1862, President Abraham Lincoln was known to visit the boy's body in Georgetown's Oak Hill Cemetery; cradling the small corpse in his arms in the dark of night. Not quite a year into his presidency at the time, and fast on the realisation that the Civil War wouldn't be ending any time soon, Saunders imagines this as a moment of reckoning for Lincoln – cradling his dead child and envisioning those thousands of parents of dead soldiers who will never again hold their own sons. What must Lincoln have thought at that moment; when he knew that, with a few concessions and the stroke of a pen, he could have ended that bloody antagonism?
But them's just the facts. In addition to the historical, we are introduced to the incorporeal residents of Oak Hill; a chorus of spirits, stuck in the bardo, too attached to their former lives to even acknowledge they are dead (referring to their coffins as “sick-boxes” and pussyfooting around reality; closing their eyes and stoppering their noses when the dawn forces them to reenter their decaying cadavers). When young Willie first emerges from the crypt and refuses the old-timers' advice to move on – Willie knows his father needs him too much for him to leave – a variety of characters join the unfamiliar scene: from a pious reverend to a foul-mouthed white trash couple; from a decorated slave owner (who brags of keeping his men in line by raping their women in front of them) to a well-spoken Uncle Tom (whose only regret upon death was never thinking to bash in his owner's head while he slept); from a trio of merry bachelors to a young mother who is literally crushed under the weight of her concern for the daughters she left behind. The three main spirits who try to help Willie are the reverend (the only one who has glimpsed what lays beyond the bardo), a naked man with a swollen member (who died before consummating his marriage), and a closeted gay suicide (who sports myriad eyes and hands as he too late glimpsed, and now yearns for, the beauty of the world he chose to exit prematurely). These three, in their efforts to help Willie, provide for the reader all the rules and reality of this self-imposed purgatory.
But that's just the what. As for the how: This novel is told as a series of quotes and citations (complete with proper attributions) from real and imagined sources. There are snippets from newspapers, memoirs, and letters describing a reception held at the White House on the night of Willie's death – many criticising the Lincolns for hosting a party while the country was at war; others knocking them for laughing and feasting below while their son lay abed upstairs; still others relating how one or the other was constantly checking on the boy – and engrossingly, even the “factual” sources are inconsistent in their details (some say the moon was full and glowing, others a dim sliver; later snippets disagree as the colour of Lincoln's eyes, or whether his hair was greying). When the sections move to the graveyard, the story is still told in quotes – as though after the fact, despite seemingly occurring in the present – and often, but not always, dialogue is reported as though witnessed by another (instead of “I said this”, the three main spirits have conversations by quoting one another). And this quirk, in addition to having background spectres tell their stories as though quoting their own memoirs, allows for a variety of fascinating writing styles: The educated bachelors (We Three had never Wed, not truly Lov’d, but once Night fell again, and if we found ourselves Resident here, might strike the ‘never’) are distinct in voice from the barely literate commoner (I steal every chanse I git) and from the drunken lowlife (We couldn't even fit that f----er, that beautiful couch, through the s----y little door of that s---thole by the river.) There are funny bits and deep thoughts and somehow with this format, Saunders is able to both show and tell at the same time. And while all of the action takes place over the course of one night, Abe himself is never far from the scene:
His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow, toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow, that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather, its like had been felt, would yet be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated, because, in this state, he could be of no help to anyone and, given that his position in the world situated him to be either of great help or great harm, it would not do to stay low, if he could help it.One man's grief stands in for the grief of an entire nation, and with a chorus of individuals adding their unique contributions, the reader is zoomed in and out, encouraged to empathise with both the personal and the universal (for we will all lose and eventually be lost ourselves). There were so many fine, small moments, all adding up to a big, cohesive whole – told in a refreshingly different, compellingly readable format – and this is everything.
The Man Booker 2017 Longlist:
4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster
Days Without End by Sebastian Barry
History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
Solar Bones by Mike McCormack
Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor
Elmet by Fiona Mozley
The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie
Autumn by Ali Smith
Swing Time by Zadie Smith
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Days Without End by Sebastian Barry
History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
Solar Bones by Mike McCormack
Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor
Elmet by Fiona Mozley
The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie
Autumn by Ali Smith
Swing Time by Zadie Smith
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Eventually won by Lincoln in the Bardo, I would have given the Booker this year to Days Without End. My ranking, based solely on my own reading enjoyment, of the shortlist is:
Autumn
Exit West
Lincoln in the Bardo
Elmet
4321
History of Wolves
