The phantasmagoria of George Saunders

Distinguished writers can be as misleading as anyone when it comes to puffing people in their profession. I'm sure Zadie Smith reveres George Saunders, until recently confined by his own choice to the genre of the short story, even more than I now do. But it was frankly silly of her to declare that 'not since Mark Twain has America produced a satirist this funny'. Hello? Kurt Vonnegut? Philip K. Dick (whom I regard more as satirist through dystopia than a 'sci-fi author')? Without their examples Saunders' earlier work would surely not have been possible. But he has at his previous best equalled them in imagination. And with Lincoln in the Bardo, the full-length novel which won the 2017 Man Booker Prize, he seems to have produced 'a masterpiece' (Z Smith again, and I'll give her that one).

First, a bit about what I read after that - chiefly The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, which I'm glad I bought in an edition also including the 12 stories of In Persuasion Nation. Were one playing the 'first line of a book' game - details available on request if you don't know it - the real entry would probably stand out a mile when it comes to Frightening Phil:

It's one thing to be a small country, but the country of Inner Horner was so small only one Inner Hornerite at a time could fit inside, and the other six Inner Hornerites had to wait their turns to live in their own country while standing very timidly in the surrounding country of Outer Horner.

Casual introduction of alien vocabulary is very Dick-ian, and we soon take it for granted that the dramatis personae are made up of odd mechanical bits and pieces: the bolt holding Phil's brain in place 'on his tremendous sliding rack occasionally fell out, causing his brain to slide rapidly down his rack and smash into the ground'. So when nasty things are done to the Inner Hornerites, the 'dismantling' keeps explicit brutality at bay, but still somehow horrifies. Enough on that story; suffice it to say that border issues and the character of Phil, such as it is, keep it topical.  

The tales of In Persuasion Nation range from the comically disconcerting to the downright disgusting. The territory, in which commerce and mind-control come together in a sometimes plausible future, is familiar; I wonder if Charlie Brooker knew them and did likewise in Black Mirror (with very mixed results). But in the context of what's to come, the sudden deaths and casual slipping into Saunders' very own version of ghostlife at the very end of the last story, 'commcomm', show us where the essential weirdness of Lincoln in the Bardo comes from.

There's a difference, though, not just in terms of metaphysical scope but also in the setting, a very specific past time and happening, February 1862, and the death of Abraham Lincoln's 11-year-old son Willie. Not having read much about the construction, I was baffled at first: who's speaking, where and what is this character, that character? Ghosts, of course, stuck in a peculiar limbo and manifesting visuals - a gigantic member, multiple heads - which no film could easily render (I see from the below that there's been an attempt, but it limits what can be done, while Saunders' verbal imagination takes you much further).

There are incredible passages - well, it's all incredible, but I mean that in the sense of transcendent: the 'matterlightblooming phenomenon' with which angels whisk up some of the lost souls in the cemetery; the recollection of the past which an action of ghost-Willie brings upon the others towards the end of the fantasia. Why they choose to remain is unclear - vaguely, it's about to clinging on to life without realising you're dead, as I read it. But as in great poetry, you don't challenge the sense.

Saunders uses all this to give us a wide panorama of American life and characters both of that time - recounted in selections from the literature about Lincoln - and before it. There's also a very moving connection between Lincoln and two of the 'shard' souls, the spirits of black slaves. But to tell more would be to take away the magic. The aura remains. Buy the hardback Bloomsbury edition if you can, a beautiful piece of book production, and set aside a day to read it.

Writer as prophet: Janne Teller and Philip K Dick

Janne Teller wrote the first version of War, her razor-sharp imagining of - in its latest, English-language incarnation - Brits as refugees forced to flee a devastated London for sanctuary in Egypt, as If the Nordic countries were at war in 2001. It might have seemed prophetic, but Denmark was already turning its back on compassion for immigrants, and besides, Teller herself comes from a family of Austrian/German refugees.

The point being, I suppose, that writers who seem so prophetic are simply aware of the eternal values and predicaments, history repeating itself or at least rhyming. It's not, in my opinion, their place to examine the causes. One person in the very interesting and distinguished company Janne's and our mutual friend Marianne had assembled for Sunday brunch and a reading raised that aspect, and it's true that there are different kinds of writers who combine fiction with polemical journalism.

But the imagination must have its free rein in selecting what it thinks is pertinent, and Teller has done that so powerfully in the other myths she's created (I've already written here about Nothing, which I was inspired to buy at Glyndebourne following the Youth Opera's extraordinary work on a project derived from it, and I'm currently spellbound in the middle of Odin's Island, where Teller raises questions about dogmatic religions and politics in the imagined face of the old god coming back to earth as a wizened, forgetful little old man).

War is not so much a myth as a what if? miniature masterpiece. It's so short and to the point that I might dent it by quoting or evoking; suffice it to say that it makes you face all the realities of, say, Syrian refugees by applying them to yourself. As Teller writes in her afterword, 'it becomes about the definition of self, both for the ones who arrive as strangers as for the ones who receive the strangers'. The presentation, as a sort of EU passport with very singular illustrations by Helle Vibeke Jensen, pushes boundaries in book production, too. I'd like to see the many other versions in different languages. Each must be specially tailored to the country in question's circumstances. What was she like to meet? Absolutely natural, curious and gracious, everything you would expect.

I turned to Philip K Dick's The Man in the High Castle because I wanted to follow up Philip Roth's The Plot Against America with another vision of an American dystopia. Little did I know what a remarkable exercise in literary style I was going to find. Like Kurt Vonnegut in his so-called Science Fiction books, Dick has been pigeonholed in a way that would seem to stop him being acclaimed as one of the best writers of all time.

So here, too, it's not just the imagination or the prophecy; the sheer humanity of Dick's complex characters makes this as heartwrenching a novel as Roth's, and much closer to what may happen in America with Trump's advent (if it ever gets to him becoming President - one begins to have hopeful doubts of the kind that have proliferated with the Brexit quagmire).

Not that the parallels of the actual situation are as close. San Francisco sits within the Japanese sphere of influence, a much better alternative to the Nazi zone which includes New York. Nevertheless so much in each character's stream of consciousness is pertinent to now, like when the double agent Baynes aka Wegener reflects on the fellow German with whom he is travelling (with apologies for filleting; it's all good):

Am I racially kin to this man?...So closely that for all intents and purposes it is the same? Then it is in me, too, the psychotic streak. A psychotic  world we live in. The madmen are in power...

But he thought, what does it mean, insane? A legal definition. What do I mean? i feel it, see it, but what is it?

He thought, it is something they do, something they are. It is their unconsciousness. Their lack of knowledge about others. Their not being aware of what they do to others, the destruction they have caused and are causing....

Their view; it is cosmic. Not a man here, a child there, but an abstraction: race, land. Volk, Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honourable men but of Ehre itself, honour; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Güte; but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time. They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life. Because eventually there will be no life...

They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history. They identify with God's power and believe they are godlike. That is their basic madness. They are overcome by some archetype; their egos have expanded psychotically so that they cannot tell where they begin and the godhead leaves off.

And so on. Not everything here applies to Trump, I know. But it's all good, even when Dick is at his most freewheeling. And he tells a taut story which eventually becomes a thriller, interweaving the lives of the five main characters and giving the only woman independence of spirit (not bad for 1962). Cleverest of all, perhaps, is the idea of the novel-within-the-novel, the 'Man in the High Castle' Hawthorne Absensen's vision of an alternative reality which corresponds in many respects, though crucially not all, to what actually happened after the Second World War. Dick not only 'quotes' from the book but uses it as a tool of hope - the power of the spoken word to kindle a resistance.

The ending is deliberately left open, so that the novel lives beyond its physical duration. Even so, I'm not going to watch the TV series, which seems from a resume to be rather loosely based on the book in the first place. 20 episodes down and another series about to be released? Doesn't look right to me. The Ur-text's the thing.

In another connection, take a look at what I've written about Péter Esterházy's text for his friend Péter Eötvös's Halleluja - Oratorium Balbulum over on The Arts Desk. The two pictured above in their only photographed meeting in March this year - Esterházy died in July just before Halleluja's world premiere - by Szilvia Csibi for Müpa Budapest. Two more prophets, then, who know about the laws of recurrence.