Short-story maestro George Saunders combines the real with the surreal in his long-form debut to bring us a joyous, comically macabre exploration of love, death and loss.
When Willie Lincoln, the 11-year-old son of US president Abraham Lincoln, died of a fever in 1862 Washington DC, his distraught statesman father visited his entombed body several times the night after his funeral.
Into this historical fact, Saunders weaves a masterful fictional tale of young Willie’s arrival in the bardo, the Buddhist transitional realm between the living and the dead – and his meeting with its eclectic inhabitants.
The story draws on real historical – and often contradictory – accounts of the US president’s despairing reaction to his son’s death and mixes them into a paranormal tale narrated by the other spirits inhabiting the bardo.
The death of a child and the battle for his immortal soul is not the most obvious theme for a comic novel, but Buddhist Saunders delivers a pacey, unconventional work – with an unorthodox layout that takes a little getting used to – that is bursting with life.
He handles the characters with such a light and loving touch that he has created an utterly absorbing tale that is as much about those other people inhabiting the limbo, their lost lives and unexplored futures, as it is about Willie and his father’s knife-sharp grief.