Why Vigil, a wacky, ‘climate change Christmas Carol’ is dividing readers

Yet he is painfully aware that this is “an impossible way to live”, an “idiot compassion” that eliminates personal responsibility and enables people to continue their immoral actions unimpeded. Sometimes people need to get their “asses kicked” in order to change. Such criticisms are (mostly) expressed by the French inventor, and the “triangulation” between him, Boone, and Jill drives much of the plot.

The complexity of a master

Neither view has won out in Saunders’s mind, or on the page; his aim was to represent the two competing philosophies as precisely and persuasively as possible, and “let them hover there”. His approach reminds me of John Keats’s definition of “negative capability”, the capacity of “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. Keats argued that this marked out the greatest writers such as Shakespeare.

Saunders agrees that this is “the essence of what art can do for us”. “Normally we don’t have time for that shit. But when I read the masters, I’m just reminded of how often I judge too soon. The world is so much bigger than my ability to understand it, yet I’m always acting as if I 100% understand it,” he adds. “To me, it’s a little bit sacramental, for just a couple of hours a day, to go ‘Oh, my actual everyday self is a little bit flawed’.” Writing in this way was a step outside his comfort zone, he says. “Most of my other works don’t really land in a place of ambiguity.” 

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Like Lincoln in the Bardo, Vigil has been informed by Saunders’s Buddhist faith, including the belief in our need to transcend the ego and let go of Earthly desires. This provides some of the latest novel’s most moving passages, as Jill temporarily descends from her “elevated” state and wrestles with unfinished business in her corporeal life.