This article is taken from the March 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
The rise of George Saunders has come like Hemingway’s description of a bankruptcy: gradually, then suddenly. For a long time his profile was restricted by his exclusive focus on short stories — but what stories! He developed a unique form: voice-driven, absurdist, but always compassionate for his put-upon characters, whether they were wage slaves toiling in a caveman theme park or trafficked women used as human lawn ornaments.
The distinctiveness of his vision — giving a sense that he was speaking individually to you — made readers evangelical. When I first read him with the collection Pastoralia (2000), I pressed him on everyone. His satire was not so much comedy as warning: “specificity, precision and brevity drive us towards compassion,” he has said, whilst “all attempts at world domination begin with weak, evasive, impersonal language”.
But I wondered too whether his compressed style could be applied successfully to the novel form. His first novel Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) showed that he could do things differently: born as an aborted play, it comprised the voices of spirits watching Abraham Lincoln tend the body of his son Willie at a graveyard in Washington, DC. Its comic energy, looser than his stories, was too diffuse for me, though the novel won the Booker Prize and made Saunders a household name.
His second novel Vigil sounds on the surface like more of the same — the borderline with death, a chorus of characters — but it has a finer through-line. There are two people at its centre: K.J. Boone is an 84-year-old oil magnate on his deathbed; Jill “Doll” Blaine is a 22-year-old who is already dead.
Jill, we learn, died horribly as the mistaken victim of a car bomb and has spent what we might call her post-life years learning how to be a comfort to those about to make the same journey. “You cannot free him,” is her watchword, “but you might comfort him.” Jill has reached the conclusion that everyone deserves comfort, even her killer, because “who else could you have been except exactly who you are?”
This goes even — especially — for those beyond the pale, such as the dying Boone, whose crime was not being an oilman but being central to the lobbying, sleight of hand and obfuscation that made climate change denial a winning position. “Millions of dollars are spent propagating a falsehood. That falsehood goes out into the world and alters it.” “And now look,” says one of the spirits from Boone’s past. “We won the fight.” “You’re about to get away unscathed, pal,” adds another.
So Boone is unrepentant about the harm he has done. He declines to recant, even though he knows his role. “The weather made him anxious. He felt blamed by it.” But Jill’s principle stands firm: no blame, just comfort. If we are all “inevitable occurrences”, then “it would be impossible, even ludicrous, to pass judgement”. If this seems simplistic, then Saunders brings in an opposing voice, an unnamed Frenchman who is outraged by Jill’s all-forgiving approach. “Tell me, do you believe it? Really believe it? Bad and good are the same?”
All this is styled in Saunders’ trademark perky, colloquial ventriloquism, as spirits line up to pass judgement on Boone: from former colleagues to an Indian man who suffered and died because of climate change. This artful approach means that Vigil isn’t a book of moral debate about the settled issue of climate change, but nor does it really hunker down into its deeper discussion of free will, forgiveness and “comfort”.
If the multiplicity of voices is intended to provide variety, it doesn’t quite work because — unlike Lincoln in the Bardo — this is a first-person narrative, and Jill’s viewpoint dominates. The plot itself — Boone’s death, and how he feels about that — is less vital than Jill’s background of accidental death and forgiveness for her killer, which in itself would have made an excellent Saunders short story.
As it is, Vigil feels overstretched, which is not something you would say about Saunders’ earlier work. It’s entertaining, and sometimes thought-provoking, but is that enough? Saunders remains a uniquely interesting author, but Vigil adds further evidence that a great fiction writer isn’t necessarily a great novelist.
If a Hollywood adage is never to work with children or animals, there should be a similar warning pinned above every novelist’s desk: beware child narrators. They are too easy to get wrong and make too cute. But Seán Farrell does it well in his debut Frogs for Watchdogs, which is narrated by a primary-school-aged boy in the Irish countryside.
The voice is slightly off-kilter but never forced. “Her face is well I never isn’t that something”, is how he describes his mother’s surprise. Home life is just the two of them: his sister B, boarding at “big school”, is only there during school holidays. Of course life as a single mother is no cakewalk, and when she loses her temper at our boy (“You’re so like your fucking father”), he philosophically accepts it. “She doesn’t say this often so it’s a special occasion.”
And so it’s inevitable that when Jerry Drain, a local farmer renting adjacent land, takes an interest in the family, mum will be flattered — but not so her son. He takes an immediate dislike to Jerry, suspecting him of subtle criminality.
All this takes place in the late 1980s, with plenty of food for similarly-aged nostalgists — watermarks in banknotes, the sensory experience of eating particular biscuits — but also unusual elements. The boy’s mum is a healer of some kind, sending out batches of sugary mix to cure ailments, some sort of homeopathic placebo. “The essence is being drawn out of it, and you can’t see the essence of a thing.”
It’s with his mother’s remedies that our boy gets the chance of revenge on Drain. There are strong set pieces building up to this, including a scene made chokingly tense from the simplest elements — a dinner table, a fist, a spoon.
And, as though to spike the tension, we do get to hear from Jerry occasionally, in italicised passages. But there’s something opaque about his thoughts, so we still can’t be quite sure of him. It adds to the sense of care taken on Farrell’s part to execute the most important element of a child narrative: balancing the gap between what the narrator knows and what the reader does. It’s this, together with the charm in the voice, that makes the book succeed.
It’s a question of personal taste whether the ultimate playout of the plot for Frogs for Watchdogs represents a failure of nerve or, contrarily, a narrative boldness. Farrell had won me over so much by this point that I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.
The approach of a new Holocaust novel provokes mixed feelings. Often, as Menachem Kaiser writes, “Nothing [is] being asked of us other than to recoil, to ‘know’.” But Friedrich Torberg’s Vengeance is Mine is different. It was published in German in 1943, and this is its first appearance in English: so it was written whilst the camps were current affairs.
But also, it has an intensity and force which puts it in the front rank of Holocaust fiction. Within a standard framing device, it tells a man’s story of his time in this small concentration camp in the Netherlands, where 500 prisoners worked breaking stones. But a small group of them attracts the attention of the camp commandant, Wagenseil, by asking for more room in the barracks. This group of Jews suffers inhuman punishments for asking for more room: whipped, tortured, beaten, encouraged to kill themselves.
Wagenseil chooses his victims at random. “One did not have to be guilty of anything. What counted was that a person belonged in the Jew barracks.” The question goes wider, to the Jews’ suffering generally. “Why, why! What did we do? Why do they hate us like this?” But one man points out that “you are not asking a good question”. As Primo Levi was told when a guard snatched from him an icicle he had taken to wet his mouth, “Hier is kein warum.” Here there is no why.
The man who said “you are not asking a good question” is Asch-kenasy, a rabbinical candidate, and discussions between him and the other prisoners become the philosophical and narrative core of the novel. One prisoner wants to accept Wagenseil’s offer to take his own life but will kill the commandant first. Aschkenasy insists that vengeance belongs not to men but to God. Is there really a choice at all?
Meanwhile Wagenseil continues his campaign against the group — against “the international Jewish conspiracy” which, he says, “will exist until there are no more Jews”. The narrator himself is up for his attention next. What will happen?
Vengeance is Mine seems to me a lost masterpiece of containment and control — so coiled with pressure that it is impossible not to read the book in one sitting. It was a book highly regarded by Torberg’s peers, from Max Brod to Erich Maria Remarque: though those two writers disagreed on the unexpected final line of the novel. It is short, too — which makes sense, because no story this intense could ever carry on for long.
