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Book Review: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

Random House, 2017

ISBN-13: 978-0812985405

Available: Hardcover, paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

 

Lincoln in the Bardo can be described as an American ghost story, but there is much more to it than ghosts in a graveyard. It’s not a book to zip through once and put down with the confidence that you have completely absorbed what it has to offer. Trying to describe it, and review it, has been difficult, but it is worth it. George Saunders won the Man Booker prize for literary fiction for this novel, but don’t let that influence whether you try it for yourself.

At the center of the story is the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son, Willie, and Lincoln’s grieving alone at night in the cemetery where Willie was laid to rest, although “laid to rest” isn’t really the best description for its residents. I didn’t know this, but a “bardo” is a Buddhist term for a kind of in-between or transitional state. The cemetery’s residents, who tell the majority of the story, are stuck in that transitional state, no longer alive but unable and unwilling to move on or even recognize that they are dead. When Willie arrives in the bardo, the other residents, based on their previous experience, expect that he will quickly move on, but when Lincoln returns to grieve, he promises to visit again, and Willie stays to make sure he is there when his father returns. Of course, as a ghost, he is unable to physically interact with his environment or with living people, and it isn’t as easy as it might seem for him to stay, especially without the help of the other ghosts of the cemetery. In fact, if he doesn’t move on, he may be taken by damned souls.

The narrative structure of the book is challenging. It alternates between sections that take place in the cemetery, with a variety of ghosts attempting to move the story forward, or include their own story, or push their way in, interrupting each other and editorializing on events and each other, and collections of multiple historical eyewitness accounts of the same events, mostly descriptions and opinions of the night Willie died and of Lincoln himself.

The parts in the cemetery can be very confusing, as the speakers (and there are many) are only named after they have spoken, so it’s not always clear who is telling the story. The reader certainly does get to see the democracy of death in America, though–  cemeteries include all kinds of people, from the repellent and hateful to decent and caring(and sometimes all of it in one person), but in this time, at the beginning of the Civil War, African-Americans are buried outside the fence and their ghosts have to rush the fence and fight off hateful racists to get in. Once they are in, many of them do speak up, and they remain some of the most powerful and lasting voices in the story.

The alternating sections of compiled contemporary eyewitness accounts are probably what was most fascinating to me. Many of them contradict each other: some are sympathetic, complimentary, or admiring, while others condemn him in the strongest terms. To see history, and Lincoln, through so many different eyes, is fascinating, and connects with Lincoln’s interior dialogue and terrible grief for both his own son, and for all of the sons he will be sending onto bloody battlefields, as imagined by Saunders. Even if the cemetery story is too much for you, I recommend at least looking through the book to see these accounts. About two-thirds of the way through you will find absolutely scathing comments and letters as bad as anything you can find about our president on the Internet.

While Lincoln in the Bardo can be read as a novel of historical fiction, or a portrait of grief, it can be funny, foul, and sometimes gross (I was not expecting a poop joke four pages in). There are many moments of tenderness, and, despite the grief, horror, denial, and anger that emerge in the cemetery, it is also hopeful for those in the bardo, and for freedom in America.

If you like your narratives to be straightforward, this is probably not the book for you. But if you are willing to try out this unusual narrative structure, and do some rereading for better understanding, this is a ghost story you won’t soon forget.

Contains: racial slurs, suicide, references to rape and child molestation.

Posted on November 27, 2018 by , Reply

Book Review: Severance by Ling Ma

Severance by Ling Ma

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux,  2018

ISBN-13: 978-0374261597

Available: Hardcover, Kindle edition, audiobook

 

Severance starts out fast and almost funny, with the author’s description of a group of survivors Googling YouTube videos on survival skills, because of course they are.  It’s 2011, and the End is here. The world has been felled by Shenzhen fever, which is a fungal infection with symptoms that initially mimic the common cold, transported worldwide from factories in China that pay their workers almost nothing and force them to work under unhealthy conditions to produce cheap consumer goods. As the infection progresses, victims find themselves trapped in repeating the same familiar motions, such as setting and clearing the table, over and over, even after their minds are gone.

Candace Chen, a millennial first-generation Chinese immigrant who is now a naturalized American citizen, loves New York City and survives there by working for a publishing company that contracts out its work to the Chinese factories in Shenzhen. Specifically, it’s her job to get Bibles published there. Ma’s demonstration of the hypocrisy involved on the part of  companies profiting off Christianity demanding custom Bibles published cheaply, and Candace’s active role in it (she is not a likable character, although she does have some relatable moments) despite the harm done to Chinese workers, is about as subtle as an anvil hitting the reader on the head. She writes lightly, though, and it often reads as satirical rather than serious.

When Candace considers quitting, she realizes she can’t escape complicity as long as she participates in a consumer economy where too many people are ready to buy cheaply made goods, and she loves the city too much to leave. As people flee the city to escape Shenzhen Fever,  or at least spend their limited lifespans with family, Candace stays put. Soon she is the only employee left at her company, kept there only by the financial incentive of a large bonus if she continues going in until a certain date, and with only her camera to keep her company as she documents the deserted city for her blog, determined to stay to the bitter end. There isn’t a lot of action in this part, so you might think this would get boring, but it just continues to build the tension.

When she does leave, she runs into a small band of survivors in an otherwise empty world, led by a power-hungry IT guy whose brutality has been freed by the end of civilization, who frequently stops the group to break into houses and steal the belongings of the dead (or sometimes the infected, mindless, living) on their way to a “safe place” he knows of, which turns out to be a shopping mall in a Chicago suburb. If you are starting to get a Romero vibe, I will tell you there are monsters in the shopping mall, but the horror is not what you think it’s going to be. Once again, we get a long, slow build broken by sharp, fast moments of violence.

This is not as straightforward a story as I have described here. The plot threads are entangled, as we learn about the effects of Candace’s story of immigration and family, both in China and the United States; her attempts to fit in with her peers and build romantic relationships; her general feeling of randomness as a twentysomething in New York City; the comfort of working in a job you are good at but don’t necessarily like; and her grasping at survival by any means necessary once that privilege is no longer available. It’s not really possible for me to explain how these come together to make her story, a disturbing and yet one which has many elements to it that should make the reader personally uncomfortable. Beyond her own story, once you read the description of  the fungal infection that ends everything, Shenzhen Fever, you’ll find yourself holding your breath. Funny and full of dread, satirical and serious, and somehow pre-apocalyptic, apocalyptic, and post-apocalytic all in the same book, Severance definitely isn’t for everyone, but readers willing to slow down occasionally will enjoy the subtle humor, feel the growing dread and desperation, and find there’s a lot for their minds to chew on.

 

 

Posted on September 2, 2018 by , Reply

Book Review: The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley


The Loney, by Andrew Michael Hurley

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016

ISBN: 9780544746527

Available: Kindle ebook, print, Audible audiobook

The Loney, set in 1976, is told in a series of recollections for a majority of the book by our narrator, Smith. It centers on what was supposed to be a pleasant trip to a small community, followed by a pilgrimage to a shrine in northern England. Father Wilfred, the priest of the local church, has passed away suddenly, and the bishop has selected Father Bernard as his replacement. Father Wilfred often took a small number of his parishioners, including the Smith family, to the shrine, during Easter. Father Bernard proposes a trip for his first Easter at his new post, much to the chagrin of the young Miss Bunce, who suggests a new locale; but the parishoners venture to the traditional place. This is a key theme throughout the novel: the “new” wanting to, according to traditionalists, encroach on the “old”, especially when it comes to religious practices and belief.

This trip with Father Bernard is meant to be special: a time for the new priest to engage with some of his new flock, for the parishoners and other guests to visit the shrine, and for God to heal Hanny, the narrator’s disabled brother. Hanny only communicates through objects, and only Smith knows how to translate his language of things. When the boys aren’t in prayer or at meals with the group, they wander out to the coastline known simply as the Loney.

Much of the story juxtaposes the old guard with the new, especially when it comes to the endless comparisons between Father Wilfred and Father Bernard by the matriarch of the Smith family. She is so used to how things had been done for years that she can’t seem to accept that things inevitably change. She is constantly telling Bernard exactly what the previous priest did, and when, and she expects tradition to be obeyed. She’s highly unlikable, from my perspective. While it can be argued that she is just doing what she thinks she needs to protect her fellow parishioners, that she knows how things need to be handled, her self-satisfied smirks make her an unsympathetic character. She “knows” that God will heal her son, even though it hasn’t happened in years previous. She “knows” the exact time when the priest is to lead the visitors in prayer, and where he is to stand. She just knows how everything is meant to be. When the religious pilgrimage happens, and they find the shrine uncared for, she can’t believe that the caretaker would have left it in such a state. When someone mentions that there may not be a caretaker, as shrines aren’t used as much anymore, she is in complete denial. How she treats Hanny, her own son, in this scene, is particularly heartbreaking.

There are times when the narrator discusses his time under Father Wilfred’s guidance as an altar boy, and his perception regarding his mother’s want for him to enter into the clergy when he graduates. One striking feature of Father Wilfred’s personality is his strictness. Given what happens to him during his last trip to the shrine, it makes me wonder about his religiosity from the very beginning. This is also a story of a priest in his seventies who loses his religion, and it terrifies him. With that realization, he tries to save a dead man from being pulled under the waves, finding there is nothing, just nothing. I can’t help but wonder of his strictness was more for himself than his congregation. Was he doubting, and not admitting it to himself, long before that time?

The last quarter of the book switches from the events at the shrine 40 years ago, to the present day. Smith, who abandoned his religion years ago after reading Father Wilfred’s diary, is now seeing a psychiatrist and working as a museum archivist. Hanny can now speak: he has a wife, children, and a career as a priest. Then a child’s remains are discovered during a winter storm on the Loney, and Hanny goes to Smith to try to piece his memories of the past back together.

The Loney is not fast-paced and plot-driven, but is more of an atmospheric, literary horror, although suspense is threaded very well throughout the story. The wet English coastline and small community create the perfect setting for a Gothic novel. The suspicious small town inhabitants and their behavior toward the visitors lends the story the perfect amount of tension. Things meant to frighten people away from certain areas are found in the wetlands, such the silhouette of what looks like a hanging man in the dark of the wetland forest, but turns out to be something else entirely. Horror also lies in relationships between some of the characters. It can also lie in the Catholic symbolism and the relation to various happenings in the novel.

I found this to be a very well written-work. The story was incredibly engaging, and lingers with me. Perhaps that, too, is where some of the horror lies. It haunts you for some time after you finish it.

Hurley won the Costa First Novel Award for The Loney in 2015.

Recommended.

Reviewed by Lizzy Walker


Posted on October 27, 2016 by , Reply
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