This latest offering from George Saunders begins with Jill ‘Doll’ Blaine hurtling towards earth, preparing to meet her newest charge, a dying man she must guide into the afterlife. Since her own death, she’s performed this job many times, offering comfort and consolation to those about to breathe their last; to soothe any negative thoughts, to help the dying resolve anything unresolved from their lives. It’s satisfying, fulfilling work.
This time, however, her charge – a rich, extremely powerful businessman called KJ Boone – refuses to be consoled, because he regrets nothing. Literally nothing. As far as he’s concerned, he’s done the world a favour. As a self-made successful oil tycoon, he’s embraced technology, employed thousands of people, has the ears of presidents and monarchs all over the world. What’s there to regret? He comes across as pretty one-dimensional – a classic narcissist who could never see anything he did in other than a positive way. There’s little nuance in his character: he’s selfish, unapologetic, uncaring. If the author’s aim was that readers waste no sympathy on him, then he has decidedly succeeded.
As the story unfolds, we learn exactly why and how Boone became so successful, mostly because others ‘of our ilk’ (as Jill refers to these ‘ghosts’ or ‘spirits’), also visit the dying man, spelling out in, no uncertain terms, his immoral practices, and hoping to make him repent his many egregious ways. They urge Jill to press her charge to acknowledge his wrongdoings, not least his indifference to the calamitous effects his businesses had, and continue to have, on his employees, his associates, and on the environment. She’s quite a sympathetic listener, alert to what Boone imparts about his childhood, and is reluctant to press him too much. She just wants to comfort him, but as the night progresses, her curiosity gets the better of her.
You may think the story is reminiscent of the ghosts who appear to Ebenezer Scrooge, but the author tells a bigger story. Not only do we learn about Jill’s charge, we also explore Jill’s own journey, from her own simple but happy life with a good man, her death at a young age. We’re privy to Jill’s thoughts, where she’s almost comparing the differences between being living ‘Jill’ and being in her current form. We discover that there are things she can still aspire to – even in the afterlife.
If you’ve read Saunders’ 2017 novel ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’, you may wonder about the author’s fascination with dead people inhabiting a kind of limbo because something in their lives was not resolved before their deaths. But ‘Vigil’ is a different book. While there are similar themes – repenting one’s sins, for instance, and the special power of family – the author asks whether redemption is truly possible at the point of death. How big a role does the notion of ‘God’ play in our lives? And what of the matter of inevitability: Jill wonders who else could Boone could have become other than what he became? Her idea of ‘inevitability’ is essentially a debate about nature versus nurture.
VIGIL is a commentary on obscene wealth, the relentless amorality of capitalism, corporate greed, the manipulation of information given to the public, not to mention the cavalier attitude to the immediate and lasting detrimental impacts of big industry in a time of extreme climate change, which is a major theme of the novel.
One spirit, G, comments on the propaganda that big businesses routinely employ to achieve their ends. He says: ‘[It’s] lying when a person uses his considerable reputation and his mastery of public communication to thrash his opponents by redirecting the attention of the general populace, thus infecting people with the tiniest sliver of doubt, which, widely propagated, becomes a sizable wedge of doubt.’ His fellow spirit, R says: ‘[We] bend the world to our will’.
We see this all the time. Climate change denial, the dismissal of science in relation to vaccines and other medical advances, misinformation peddled on various social issues, dog-whistling surrounding minorities. There are many instances from our own recent history where propaganda has swayed whole populations into disunity, all because some one group or other – political or commercial – has vested interests in this or that issue.
VIGIL covers just one night, but it’s a sprawling story, a wild ride, with a huge cavalcade of characters, some living, most of them dead. The author has invention and innovation at his fingertips. He’s dark, he’s funny, he bends the rules, he makes you ponder life’s big questions; and while the book centres on death, it’s just so full of life. George Saunders continues to create truly great literature.
George Saunders novel VIGIL will be released on 3 February 2026.
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, 177 pages
ISBN 978-1-5266-2430-7
RRP $32.95
