Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders: book review

Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) is set in 1862, a year into America’s Civil War.

The ‘biography’ commences with the sickness of American President Abraham Lincoln’s 11-year-old son William Wallace Lincoln. Willie is dying.

Abe and Mary Lincoln had already lost their second son Edward in 1850, probably of tuberculosis. Now Abraham Lincoln’s favourite little boy was hot with fever. He doesn’t take long to die, and the president is devastated. ‘He was the child in whom Lincoln had invested his fondest hopes; a small mirror of himself, as it were, to whom he could speak frankly, openly, and confidingly.’

Saunders does not narrate the story in a conventional way. Instead, he uses the voice of many people (living and dead, fictional and real – military men, reverends, men and women) to describe the dying of Willie, his death, the family emotions, the burial at Georgetown’s Oak Hill cemetery, and the movement of his soul to the hereafter.

The president goes to the crypt to hold Willie’s body: ‘stroking the hair, patting and rearranging the pale, doll-like hands’ and ‘for nearly ten minutes the man held the – sick-form.’ After the burial, in the night, Lincoln goes to the cemetery.

The soul of little Willie is trapped in purgatory – in bardo as the Tibetans say – in transition. He is neither with the living, nor in heaven, nor in hell. Two ghosts – roger bevins iii and hans vollman – discuss how to transition Willie to the next level. It is a strangely comical ‘spirited’ debate.

The voice of dead little willie lincoln can be heard too, calling out to his father: ‘Father Here I am What Should I If you tell me to go I will If you tell me to stay I will … Father’s mind was blank blankblankblank.’

While Lincoln is grieving, he still has to run the nation – to be presidential. The descriptions of Abraham Lincoln, taken from many sources, are varied – from the ugliest man you ever saw to ‘a more thoughtful face’ you ever saw, to criticism of him as ‘the weakest man who has ever been elected’ to ‘his speeches have fallen like a wet blanket.’ Thousands of men are dying in the Civil War, while Lincoln thinks only of his little William.

It is a sad, morbid portrayal of love and loss, told through the narrative of snippets from literary sources intermingled with the invention of supernatural voices that add their version of events.

This innovative form of writing (that I enjoyed) is not sequential – it backtracks, it repeats, it contradicts, it is both humorous and serious, it is fragmented, it is theatrical, it is sober, it is demoralizing, it is confusing, but it is also interesting in a ghoulish way.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).