(Audio) Book Review: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

As you can see, this isn’t a strict audio book review in that I read this book in a combination of audio and on the page. I started it on audio but then got a copy out of the library because I was having trouble keeping the characters straight. More on that below.

Willie Lincoln, the third son of Abraham Lincoln, died at the age of 11, while his father was the president of the United States and almost a year after the American Civil War had begun. There are reports that a grief-stricken Abraham Lincoln visited his son’s grave and opened his casked after Willie was interred. This is the factual outline that Saunders uses to build his novel around.

This is a novel about grief and death and the afterlife and it deals with these enormous human issues both on an intimate and individual level and on a larger, national level with the backdrop of the American Civil War. It’s massively successful and it does so by humanizing an incredibly famous figure like Lincoln while also creating incredibly real-feeling fictional characters who just so happen to be already deceased when we meet them.

I’ll say first of all that books about the US Civil War usually lose me. As a non-American and someone who has never studied the history of this war, I find a lot of historical fiction surrounding the American Civil War seem to assume a certain level of knowledge. Fair enough but I find myself getting lost in the characters I’m already supposed to know and trying to remember who wore what colour coats. So for me, a large part of this story’s success is that none of that occurs here. Abraham Lincoln is familiar enough that I already know who he is and have a decent outline idea of what he stood for. That’s all that’s required to dive into this story. Saunders also takes the highly unusual approach of explaining the setting and background of Lincoln as a person and his time in the White House entirely through quotations from other books. He pieces together a variety of quotes to set the scene of the party that the Lincolns hosted during Willie’s illness or to show the variety of opinions people had of Lincoln as both a president and a father. There’s no omniscient narrator or character explaining this world to us, simply the words of those who have written about one of the most famous men in the world.

Most of the action of the book however takes place in the graveyard after Willie Lincoln is interred. The graveyard is a sort of limbo, a bardo. A place where souls linger between our world and the afterlife. Some choose to move on quickly after death while others stay in this bardo for reasons of their own. Here we meet a diverse crowd but are primarily guided by three men – Vollman, Bevins, and the Reverend Thomas. They are three men who did not live at the same time in history and would probably never have come together while alive but they have formed a trio here in the Bardo and they take Willie Lincoln under their wing, in a manner of speaking.

Willie is unusual in that most children quickly depart this place and move on but he has chosen to stay. When his father visits him, touches his body, this only affirms his choice to linger, despite the toll it begins to take on his spirit. As I said before, this story is a powerful depiction of grief. We see the intimate grief of each of the men and women who linger in the bardo. We see Lincoln’s intense personal grief at the loss of his child. And all of this, we know, is juxtaposed against the larger grief of a nation at war and the thousands of families experiencing the same loss as Lincoln’s own. I was truly impressed by Saunders skill at balancing these themes and this variety of voices.

In many ways, this book is well suited to an audio version. The Random House Audio is narrated by a full cast with many familiar names on the list. (Nick Offerman narrates Vollman which meant I never stopped picturing him as Ron Swanson but that didn’t not fit. And yes, Megan Mullally narrates a character too.) Every name on the page is given a different voice on the audio and this did make for an interest and diverse listen. On the pages of the book, each character’s name accompanies their section every time they appear. This isn’t done in the audio, for obvious reasons, after the character is introduced for the first time. But it also meant that if I didn’t catch a character’s name the first time, it was impossible to figure out who they were going forward. Hence, getting a copy of the physical book to check who was who. Once I had that clear in my mind, I was able to follow the audio with pleasure.