h2g2 Book Review: Better Angels
Created | Updated Mar 5, 2017
Better Angels
Lincoln in the Bardo
by George Saunders
New York: Random House, 2017
There's a Weeping Angel on the title page. And if that makes you worry that the Angel might turn savagely towards a passing mourner, then you might just be ready for what's on page one of this astonishing book, which is a very different view of life, death, and time.
'Bardo' is the Tibetan term for the interstitial land where the dead sometimes linger. They aren't meant to stay there. Saunders' version of the Bardo – at least, a suburb of it in a Washington, D.C. cemetery – is populated with folk who can't make up their minds to move on. Or can't break out of the cycle of their own suffering or false desire. They creep, crawl, skim-walk, and even fly through absurd re-enactments of the lives they have lost, but are unwilling or unable to let go of. When angels appear, trying to entice them into the next world, they fight with every means at their disposal to stay in this forlorn graveyard. Even if it means they assume ever more grotesque forms. Night after night, they emerge from their tombs. They don't know what year it is, or what's happening outside the wrought-iron fence. They don't know that the world rolls on without them. They don't know it's 1862, and there's a war on. They carry on, acting out their obsessions, pursuing drives with no object, fighting off the urge to find out what comes next. And then something even stranger happens.
Two Lincolns show up in the Bardo: eleven-year-old Willie Lincoln, who has just died in the White House, and his grieving father. Abraham Lincoln could grieve like no other. The president's grief is a moving force in this story, which is populated by needy ghosts. The ghosts, in all their tragedy and absurdity, react to Lincoln's grief, and act upon it. The result may surprise you.
Who would have guessed that in 2017, the year in which the Washington Post has adopted the motto 'Democracy Dies in Darkness', a fiction novel would become a best seller, even though it demands that the reader do some thinking? Actually, quite a lot of thinking will be needed to understand this lively meditation on mourning, madness and hope. It's worth the effort, though: a writer like George Saunders comes along so rarely that it's a major cause for celebration when your brain cells get this kind of workout.
And if you don't do some weeping along with those angels, then be ashamed of yourself.
This book will be good for you. Don't miss it. You owe it to the better angels of your nature.
