This appeared in today's Indian Express.
LINCOLN IN THE BARDO George Saunders
LINCOLN IN THE BARDO George Saunders
In
the old witticism about the power of belief, scientists assert that according
to the laws of aerodynamics, the bumblebee’s body isn’t designed for flight. Being
unaware of this, the bumblebee goes ahead and flies anyway. Similarly, the
elements of George Saunders’s first novel, Lincoln
in the Bardo, don’t appear to be designed for take-off -- but it goes ahead
and soars anyway.
It
was to be expected that the tone and manner of the novel would be as
distinctive and quirky as Saunders’s acclaimed short stories. However, the
strangeness quotient here is of a different order altogether.
The
Lincoln of the title doesn’t refer to the 16th President of the
United States, but to his third son, William. And the bardo doesn’t refer to
the pronunciation of a French actress’s last name, but to the Tibetan Buddhist
concept of an intermediate state between two lives. It is in this purgatory-like
realm that the novel is set.
The
seeds of Lincoln in the Bardo are
historical, arising from the President’s prolonged grief at 11-year-old
William’s untimely death in 1862, even as American troops engage in a bloody
civil war. In Saunders’s telling, a disoriented William finds himself in the
bardo, surrounded by others who are similarly awaiting their ultimate end.
The
narration largely consists of an idiosyncratic mélange of voices belonging to
Willie and his cohorts, as they journey towards an understanding of their state
and ponder on questions of leaving behind and letting go. Some bent double,
some horizontal, some on all fours, some nude, some etiolated, some mutilated,
in ways that mirror their lives and deaths, confined within their memories,
dreams and reflections, they speculate, gossip and chatter about the goings-on
in the eerie zone they inhabit. Every once in a while, they hear a “familiar,
yet always bonechilling, firesound associated with the matter-lightblooming
phenomenon” marking the departure of “sick-forms” from this limbo of “serendipitous mass co-habitation”.
This
defiantly odd playscript-like pattern is interspersed by another collage of
voices drawn from historical records: letters, memoirs and reports, sometimes
in agreement and sometimes contradicting each other. These deal with associated
subjects such as Lincoln’s presidential ball while his son was ill, and the
state of the family after the child’s demise. Thus, in this string of 108
bead-like chapters, otherworldly voices are balanced by voices that are only
too human.
Given
that the backdrop is drawn from Tibetan Buddhism, there’s very little
philosophising, even though at one point some of the characters engage in a
brief discussion on destiny and free will, and, a little later, one is told
that “whatever way one took in this world, one must try and remember that all
were suffering”. Which is why, “though on the surface it seemed every person
was different, this was not true”. (He tells the truth, but tells it slant, as
the poet from Amherst put it.)
All
of this may make Lincoln in the Bardo
sound forbidding, if not unmanageable; yet, one learns to navigate and relish this
long, strange trip of the grateful dead remarkably soon. There’s weirdness on
this journey, but there’s also wit, pathos and redemption.
