I’ll admit it - a novel set in a graveyard doesn’t sound the most promising of starts. But bear with me; Lincoln In The Bardo is one of the most surprising novels I’ve read this year, with just enough plunging pathos to balance the swooping, joyous, life-affirming highs. The main (live) character is Abraham Lincoln – yes, that Abraham Lincoln. It’s set over a single night in Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown, but contains such a wide cast of characters that by the end of it you may feel, as I did, that you’ve run a marathon over several days.

It’s 1862, and Lincoln’s son Willie has just been buried – dead of typhoid fever aged just 11. After dark, Lincoln returns to the mausoleum where his son’s body lies, to hold him and to let out his grief. So far, so heartbreakingly sad. But what sets this apart is the chorus line of voices that narrate the entire book.

LITB Cover.jpg — Lincoln In The Bardo

Bloomsbury, 2018

George Saunders

The bardo is a Tibetan Buddhist concept, a transitional space. In this bardo, a purgatorial limbo between life and death, there are over a hundred voices that speak to, at, and often over, one another. The first voice we hear is that of Hans Vollman – a frustrated printer whose marriage will remain forever unconsummated, and who carries with him the physical effect of this frustration. His counterfoil is Roger Bevins III, a closeted gay man whose earnest yet futile wish is to experience the fullness of the beauty of life.

My heart broke from the first chapter as we hear how Willie’s non-corporeal form runs to his father, only to find that he cannot touch him or even be perceived by him. The boy has not yet realised his current state of being, and the parent in me wept.

“My friend remembers incorrectly”

The characters have the almost sibling-like relationship of those who spend inordinate amounts of time together. They cajole, criticise and correct one another in a way that is frustrating at times but often hilarious.

Their numbers include common thieving rogues, abused servants, martyred soldiers, prim pastors, and dozens of others beside. Some have been in the graveyard for mere weeks, others for decades. They none of them have anything in common, besides the fact that they can’t yet let go of the living world. They talk in devastating euphemisms: of sick-boxes and hospital yards, in yearning tones of the memories of their lives Before.

“The worst of it, for him, is over”

Alongside the graveyard’s residents’ observations of Abraham and Willie Lincoln, there are snippets of contemporaneous material, describing the child’s illness, the behaviour of the Lincolns, and the state dinners that were taking place the week that Willie died. These are as fallible and contradictory as anything the graveyard chorus can come up with, but together paint a picture of a volatile era, and a president with the weight of the world on his shoulders.

Lincoln In The Bardo won the Booker prize in 2017, up against (amongst others) Anna Burns’ Milkman, Ali Smith’s Autumn and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, which I reviewed a few weeks ago. It was a strong field and a huge coup for a debut novelist to have won. Saunders was already an accomplished journalist and short story writer, but this was his first leap to the novel form.

“We had been considerable. Had been loved”

Many people say they’ve struggled to read Lincoln In The Bardo at first, as it’s so different to anything else they’ve read. I suspect I would have been one of them, except that I listened to this one as an audiobook. Most audiobooks have one narrator, or maybe two. Lincoln In The Bardo has 166. Each character is voiced by a different actor, and it really helped me get a sense of both the scale of the book, and the variation in life experiences that Saunders evokes. Narrators include David Sedaris, Lena Dunham, and George Saunders himself. It’s quite an experience, and the various accents and inflections help separate and sort the different characters.

The story flows onwards to a glittering conclusion, and I distinctly remember having to stop the car, rewind and re-listen to make sure I’d gathered in every glorious word. The story builds and builds round not just Abraham and Willie, but many of the graveyard residents also. It’s a strange thought to picture what the graveyard would have looked like to anyone passing by – quiet, and dark, with just one man’s horse tied to the railings – while we are dizzied by the colourful swirls and eddies of the plot and the characters.

I had held off listening to this book; I knew the subject matter, and to be honest there were times when the raw anguish of Willie’s parents was just too painful. But I’m so glad I persevered – Lincoln In The Bardo is cathartic, and beautiful, and made me want to tell people in my life again and again just exactly how I feel about them. Saunders plays to perfection the unfinished business and loose ends of life.