Vigil by George Saunders

Vigil, the new novel by Booker-winning author George Saunders, takes us to the deathbed of K.J. Boone, a wealthy and successful oil executive. How does he justify his life choices, given the role that he’s played in destroying humanity’s future?

It’s a highly political novel, with clear links to climate change and corporate responsibility, but Saunders approaches his subject from an oblique angle. The story is narrated by a dead woman, Jill “Doll” Blaine, whose role in the afterlife is to comfort people in their final hours. The memorable opening scene shows our narrator plummeting to the earth and becoming embedded headfirst in the asphalt of Boone’s driveway, with her “fresh new legs bicycling energetically.”

Gradually she assumes a clearer corporeal form, extracts herself from the driveway and enters the house to find, in a small upstairs bedroom, “a tiny crimped fellow in an immense mahogany bed.”

Jill then begins her work of trying to comfort the dying man, but it’s not as easy a task as usual. For one thing, her vigil keeps getting interrupted by other dead folk, some of whom want to confront Boone for his climate denial and environmental destruction, while others try to defend him and enlist him as an ally in the afterlife.

The other thing that makes it hard is K.J. Boone himself, who is as arrogant and entitled as you’d expect from an oil company CEO. He stubbornly refuses to accept any responsibility for the damage his company has done and abuses Jill and others for attempting to hold him accountable. He dismisses any criticism as hypocritical, since we all enjoy the benefits of oil extraction as we drive our cars and heat our homes and so on.

Although Boone is an unpleasant and objectively evil character, just like any of the real-life psychopaths who head up the 36 companies that are responsible for more than half of global emissions, Saunders does make an attempt to humanise him. We get his back story of poverty in rural Wyoming, the need to fight from an early age to compete with people who had better starts in life.

On top of that, Boone seems genuinely to have believed that what he was doing was right. He has a paternalistic and patronising view of the general public as idiots who don’t understand how dependent they are on fossil fuels for their way of life. It’s up to men like him, he thinks, to make the hard choices, to give us what we need for our comfort and security, even if we hate him for it. It’s a view that I think a lot of powerful men have, not just in the fossil fuel industry but in national security and other positions: Kissinger probably thought like this as he was fomenting coups, Cheney when he was justifying the destruction or Iraq and the abuses of Guantanamo, etc.

The truth, of course, is that we all know how dependent we are on fossil fuels, but we prefer to sacrifice some comfort than to live in a dying world. And perhaps if we ended the $7 trillion in annual fossil fuel subsidies and invested that money in renewables and researching other solutions, we wouldn’t need to give up so much anyway.

Nevertheless, Boone’s justifications help to make him human. As abusive as he is, as stubborn and as aggressive and as wrong-headed, we see the context that made him this way. As Jill struggles to continue her job of comforting him even as she starts to hate him, she introduces a more empathetic way of looking at him:

“Be not afraid, I said. For you are inevitable. An inevitable occurrence. Who else could you have been but exactly who you are?”

This is the way she sees people since her “elevation”, which is a kind of enlightenment that occurred after her own death, when she came to understand that people are shaped by their circumstances and deserve compassion rather than condemnation. She applies this even to her own killer, a man called Paul Bowman who is truly odious. If she can have empathy and compassion for him, surely she can for Boone too.

And yet it’s not easy. She struggles to maintain this high-minded attitude in the face of Boone’s bluster and abuse, as more details emerge of how much he knew about the destruction climate change would cause and how he publicly denied it to keep the oil and the profits flowing a bit longer.

When she is in an “elevated” state, Jill exists outside of her individual self, so that memories of her life seem distant, and everyday items are put in quotation marks to indicate that they have no real meaning to her:

I am digging away at the surface of “school desk” with the point of “compass” from “Sears” as “Mrs. Kiley” drones on.

But her interactions with Boone bring her out of contact with the post-death human collective and closer to her individual self, which can be vengeful, angry, petty and violent. Vigil evolves into a struggle for Jill’s own soul as well as for Boone’s. She ends up using her considerable power to lacerate two dead scientists who took money from Boone to publish papers denying the reality of climate change.

“Therein lay the danger of existing out of elevation. Of retaining even a trace of one’s former self: One’s pity became constricted. One judged, one preferred, one acted and, in acting, erred.”

I found these sections of the novel quite powerful. They get at the heart of how we deal with people who do bad things, whether that’s trashing the environment or committing violent crimes or whatever else. As much as the “elevated” argument makes sense, it’s still difficult to deny personal responsibility and to avoid judging and blaming and being angry at people who do wrong. As a reader, I wanted to see Boone punished in some way, or at least to have him acknowledge the harm he had done and try to make amends.

In essence, what we have is the conflict between compassion and justice. The ending does offer some partial sense of justice, but I won’t go into the details to avoid spoiling Vigil for you if you want to read it.

Vigil covers a lot of ground, then, and yet it does so in under 200 pages. I think more space could have helped Saunders develop his complex themes more fully, but on the other hand, the premise of a single night’s vigil for such an unpleasant human being is not one you’d want to follow for 500 pages. Then again, it’s a similar premise to his Booker-winning Lincoln in the Bardo, which was about twice the length.

I think it’s unlikely that Vigil will reach those heights of critical appreciation, but it’s a worthwhile read for anyone who wants to think through the effects of climate change and more broadly how we deal with those who have wronged us, either individually or collectively.

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On his blog A Writer’s Life, British novelist Andrew Blackman shares book reviews, insights into the writing process and the latest literary news, as well as listing short story contests with a total of more than $250,000 in prize money.