Booker lore has it that the favourite never wins. The surprise this year was that George Saunders had done just that.
As the second US winner in a row, his victory may give further ammunition to the chorus of voices decrying American domination of the prize, but it’s a resoundingly good decision.
For two decades, Saunders has been acclaimed for his surreal and unsettling short stories set in uncanny theme parks and soul-crushing corporations. So the news last year that he was finally publishing a novel was greeted with delight.
Lincoln in the Bardo turned out to be as fantastical, funny and deeply affecting as Saunders’ short fiction – but the broader canvas gave him more room to experiment with form and develop his representation of character and national identity.
At a time when America is notably divided, the book drills down to its early rupture. At its centre is a kernel of historical truth: that during the civil war, Abraham Lincoln, heartbroken after his 11-year-old son Willie had died of typhoid, went into the cemetery where he was laid to rest to hold his body.
Around this intimate family tragedy at a time of violent national strife, Saunders creates a supernatural fantasy: the cemetery is full of unquiet souls, squabbling ghosts trying to help Willie on his way through the “bardo”, what Tibetan Buddhists see as another stage of consciousness in the hinterland between life and death.
Not only is the novel partly told through a cacophony of these ghostly voices, laid out on the page like a play script, but the historical context of Willie’s death is partly assembled out of quotes from contemporary accounts. Taken together, they demonstrate the impossibility of a fixed historical record, worrying away at the boundaries between truth and fiction with that mixture of human fallibility and earnestness that is Saunders’ stock in trade.
This audacious experimentalism makes Saunders a writer’s writer, but he’s very much a reader’s writer too. A book that sounds in summary as though it could be tough going is in fact incredibly welcoming.
Saunders’ project has always been one of radical empathy: to forge connections through the most unlikely means and in the most unpromising contexts. In this book there is warmth mixed into the weirdness, moral force behind the grotesquerie, and wild humour amid the tragedy. There’s never been a novel like it.
