A ghost-love story

George Saunders (2017). Lincoln in the Bardo, Bloomsbury

‘These and all things started as nothing, latent within a vast energy broth, but we then named them and loved them, and, in this way brought them forth. And now must lose them.’

        roger bevins in Lincoln in the Bardo

This is the Man Booker winning experimental debut novel from George Saunders. The story opens in the United States of mid nineteenth century, with President Lincoln’s son Willie fighting for his life, while the country is gripped in civil war. Willie dies and is buried in a Georgetown cemetery in a marble crypt. His mother descends into grief and madness. The President is bent on returning to his son as he visits the crypt and talks to him lovingly. This agonizing love, guilt and longing reaches his son across the veil of death.

The Bardo- which in Tibetan language means ‘that place between life and death’- is populated with a bevy of rich characters, all in a state of oblivion. People of all sorts have carved out a space for themselves in this netherworld, the high and the low, god fearing and nihilists, with their friendships and subterfuge. Into this world, little Willie descends, expecting his father to come and visit him again. The entry of the little boy creates a new sensation among the inhabitants of the lively Bardo and they unite to help Willie ‘pass over’. For this plot to succeed, they must have an unlikely ally- the President himself. How Willie is transported on through the unlikely alliance of his father and the Bardo, forms the rest of the story.

The central theme that runs through the story is that of love and loss, the deep human ache to retrace lost tracks and reclaim our pasts. Saunders shows us a way of moving on after a devastating loss, not by forgetting, but by letting go, accepting, freeing ourselves from the burden of care for the loved one. He attacks the very idea of loving by living, by showing, by acting- our love for those who are dead should be a different kind of love. It cannot find meaning in the repetitive acts of expression through words and deeds, for this creates a tomb of the past, a never-ending mourning. A graceful way of loving the dead is to not act or talk but to think, to ache and hold. It is not a love that hinges on sharing, sympathy and reciprocity. It is a silent one-sided love, not prone to the tempest of action, time or space. That is how love for someone who is absent looks like.

The deep contrast to Lincoln’s throbbing aching love is the cohort in the Bardo, ebullient, devoid of all memory and sense of being. They are literally a ghost of their previous Saunders uses the oldest trick in the book to make the imaginary world real- by turning metaphors into their heads. They are accustomed to a charade, a clinging on to the most mundane that defined them when they were alive. Willie’s arrival infuses a human-like feeling in them for the first time- passion, purpose and fellow feeling.  Eventually helping Willie to freedom helps the Bardo to free itself.

This unusually poignant novel works because of its audacity- the narrative style, the imagination at one level, and the philosophy that is conveyed through polyphony that testifies to love, loss and what it takes to heal and be free.