Backlisted - Lincoln in the Bardo minicast

Episode Date: March 27, 2017

A little something extra for you, the lovely Backlisted listeners, and a departure from our usual subject matter - a new(ish) book! After recording the upcoming show on Patrick Hamilton's 'Slaves Of Solitude' with guests authors Lissa Evans and Stuart Evers, John & Andy took the opportunity to ask them what they thought of George Saunders' debut novel. Normal service will be resumed next week. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Mini-sode. And we are joined at the kitchen table of Unbound by Stuart Evers. Hello, Stuart. Hello there. And Lister Evans. Hello. And we've just been recording literally hours of material for the next episode track after track

it's like the basement tapes yeah it's like yeah yeah slightly less sober but we have a rare but we have a rare

please don't start me off so we have a rare... LAUGHTER Please don't start me off. So we have a rare opportunity here. I talked a couple of podcasts ago about the novel Lincoln and the Bardot by George Saunders. I said on that episode that, first of all, I really loved the novel, that I thought it was a masterpiece, and that I also felt in my former bookseller role that it was going to be a big hit.

All the indications were that it was going to be a big hit. All the indications were that it was going to be a big hit. Well, here we are a month later. The book went to number one in the New York Times bestseller list. My colleague, John Mitchinson, has now had time to read it. But as luck would have it, we realised that both of our guests, Evers and Evans, have also read Lincoln and the Bardot. So I am going, you listeners know my feelings about Lincoln and the Bardot and about George Saunders, I'm going to hand to my colleague John Mitchison and say, John, did you enjoy

Lincoln and the Bardot? Not only did I enjoy it, Andy, I fully, fully join you in my belief that it is an overused word masterpiece. I've read two contemporary novels in the last 12 months that have totally blown me away and made me rethink what fiction is capable of doing. One was Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad. Yes.

And the second was Lincoln and the Bardo by George Saunders. And like you, perhaps, and we're about to find out, I'm struggling a little bit to think why anybody who loves fiction and loves storytelling and loves and loves the possibility of the novel wouldn't say yo George

you've knocked it out of the park I mean I thought it was as you know very funny very clever very moving and I couldn't put it down so that to me is fairly straightforward. However I've become aware that there are other readers who have had a

different experience when reading this novel and two of them I believe are with us. Two people it has to be said whose opinions we feel you know, we've not pulled in readers off the street here ladies and gentlemen. We've pulled in people who we feel, you know, we've not pulled in readers off the street here, ladies and gentlemen. We've pulled in people who we feel connected to on a very deep level.

I mean, these are people who, if Lisa Evans told me to read something, I would read it. If Stuart Evers told me to read something, I would read it. So, guys, over to you. I thought it was all right. I'll go along with that. I mean, it's a very quick read, obviously, because it's in dialogue.

A lot of it is in play form, although it's set out as if it's not in play form. It is essentially a play. There's probably only about 20,000 words in it. You whip through it, and it's very readable, and I enjoyed it. But to say that it's bringing literature several steps forward is extraordinary it's it's an experiment and it you know it's it's quite a

good experiment but it's just a step sideways it's not going to change literature as we know it and I thought it was readable it was moving in parts I felt it was touch sentimental and I thought the end was unbelievably sugary yeah I enjoyed it so I would like to go on record as saying that I enjoyed it too but I do and I think this is an issue that I shouldn't be swayed and a reader one should not be swayed by the critical reaction to something but I think it's when you have people that you really care about and people people's opinions you really care about and they are saying masterpiece and the rest of it that that perhaps um you need to that i do feel like

stepping back and recording slightly and um and but it's important to say that i do think it's a good book and i really enjoyed it and it's excellently done however I have several issues with the book, one of which is genuinely about whether it really needs to be a novel. What I often consider about a great novel is that it can only be told one way, that a great novel needs to exist only in one form. It couldn't be done in another way so if you read paradise by tony morrison or as i lay dying by by faulkner they feel like they can only ever be done one way or ulysses being being a fantastic example or mrs dalloway and i feel that this book has been cobbled together from various different things and at the heart of it is one central image. And that central image, which is inescapable and so wonderfully, brilliantly put together,

is Lincoln with his son. His son in the mausoleum, his dead son. And that image is impossible to get away from. Once that's in your head, you can't get that out of your head. It is utterly, utterly beautifully incredibly done but to me the novel is trying to create an apparatus and a structure and some kind of scaffolding around this particular image like a persistence of an image and what he's done is he's tried to cobble together what it feels like to me is cobble together makes it sound less good than it actually is but what he's done is he's tried to cobble together what it feels like to me is cobble together makes it sound less good than it actually is but what he's trying to do is to construct a novel around this

particular um particular image and i don't think that the the structural apparatus around it um is as good as this particular image so i also have a problem with the fact that it's clearly written as a play i mean you know in the proof copy that i've got in the back it actually has an explanation where he says it started life as a play and which you can you can definitely see but on a play when you've got and they've just they've just sold the film rights as well so we will see this but i don't think i don't think it is because because because what's happened is that we've got the flip the flip side of this where when you're writing a play you don't have to worry about things like description of

what people look like how they speak or anything particularly like that because it's all done in the dialogue but what saunders has to do in in this because he understands the way that it's set out that the um you get the bit of text and underneath you get the name but most people tend to skip the small caps underneath so so so so what happens is when you're reading it saunders has to and he realizes this he has to give visual clues or semantic clues to prove that you're reading a different person um so a lot of the voices are actually quite similar in lots and lots of ways because they're of a particular time etc so he has to come up with ways to make them different so you know like on a stage you'll see people and there's like there's the woman with the hat there's the ghost with the um still in their sick box or whatever it is um but he has to give them semantic or visual clues

so there's the one who swears a lot with the lines through the swear words, which is kind of fine, but whatever. It doesn't really do it for me personally. Then there's the way that Willie's narrative bits are done like E.E. Cummings poetry, so this kind of cut-up bit. So you don't think that's Willie before you even get to his name at the bottom. yw'r bwyllgorau naratif yn cael ei wneud fel poedriaeth E.E. Cummings, felly mae'r bwyllgorau wedi'u llwyddo. Felly, rydych chi'n gwybod mai dyna Willie, cyn i chi ddod i'w enw ar y dde. Mae gennych chi'r

gynhyrch sydd am ryw fath yn siarad yn ffenetig, ond nid yw unrhyw un arall yn ei wneud, am ddim o ran unrhyw ffordd. Felly, pan mae hi'n dweud cwestiwn, mae'n cael ei sbelio Q-W-E-S-T-O-N, sydd, rwy'n credu, yn rhaid i chi feddwl bod y person hwn yn llai addysgol na'r Q-W-E-S-T-O-N, which I guess you're supposed to think this person is less educated than the others, but if you're listening to the voices, then obviously they would all be phonetic, or they're either all phonetic or they're not. There doesn't seem to be a real reason why there is. And I think this is not to take away

from a fantastic work of fiction and a brilliant central plank on which this this book is is placed but i think to call it a masterpiece um papers over some of its its definite issues and what i think is happening is that by the end of it you're so kind of overwhelmed by the whole the holistic grandeur of it that actually you're forgiving it for some of its stuff that that is a really good point okay it's time now for an advert that is a good point but i would like counter to that i don't disagree with a lot of that absolutely but one's appreciation of the book is often determined, I think, by one's enjoyment in the book.

Yeah. And what you would refer to as papering over, I felt one of the great strengths of the book is this enormous propulsive energy of it, that the rhythm of it, that bounces between the dialogues as they go along, the people speaking, is enough to create a kind of momentum

that, as Alyssa, which clearly didn't work for you, whereby I felt myself carried along on this sort of wave of invention, linguistic invention. And therefore, when you were saying about the one character who speaks in the particular way she does for me that totally worked i didn't have any problem with that because it's about creating that variety of voices and variety of things to look at when you read space shape you know all those

things that push you through a book that aren't just about consistency. But I think that some of this is down to the fact that... And I've had lots of private conversation, because this is a... You know, as much as there can be a controversial issue or a controversial stance on a novel these days, being not for Lincoln and the Bardot people love it and I don't want to stop people from liking it

that's why we wanted people to hear us talking about it because it's so exciting to have a novel that people feel like Stuart and I really enjoyed it I think there's a thing that happens with a book which is really to me it's really interesting that strangeness

that difficulty that kind of oddness that sense of you you know you're the full the floor falling away from under your feet sometimes that's the thing that makes something really really work for you but sometimes if you've kind of if you've sort of felt I don't know it's it's it's almost what I felt with it was that I thought this was a book that was so audacious in its ability to to mix humor with seriousness to to be formally inventive and I'm not I don't I mean if you ask me does it all work I I think probably it doesn't all work. But it's interesting that both of you have had that thing. At a certain point, you decided that you couldn't quite buy into what he was doing. And I completely respect that, because that's what's interesting to me about fiction, is that there are novels that push at the boundary of things.

I'm sorry to interrupt you, John, but there's all this stuff about pushing at the boundaries. For me, it's just a bit of tricksiness doing that, and I think it could have been a greater novel if it had been done in prose, as novels are. And for me, it's like half a play jammed together with some beautiful prose. I mean, he writes beautifully. I'm not disputing it. But for me, it's like half a play jammed together with some beautiful prose. I mean, he writes beautifully. I'm not disputing it.

But for me, it's like a party trick. I don't... When I read a novel, you know... I don't know, I'm getting a bit squeaky here. No, I think... You know, the amazing thing is I kind of understand your point of view completely. That is amazing. But I think this comes back to what I was saying

about the feeling like it's wearing a set of clothes rather than the actual book that it could have been. So particularly in the early sections, which did rub me up a little bit the wrong way with the historical sources mixed with the fictional historical sources telling you this. And I was like, do some work, you know, write this. If you need, if you, if you want to write this, then write it.

And, you know, you can, you're allowed to have the, the ghosts are fine. I mean, like if you, if you, if that's what you want to do, but it didn't feel to me like he truly inhabited what he wanted from this as a book. And, Lyssa, I think that's... Yes, I think, yeah. You said very eloquently what I was thinking. Thank you. Well, listen, thanks very much.

You should go read it. Yeah! Link in the Bardo is available from Bloomsbury. That's fiction, ladies and gentlemen. And other novels are available. You can choose to listen to Backlisted with or without adverts. If you prefer to listen to it without adverts, you can join us on our Patreon,

patreon.com forward slash backlisted, where you also get bonus content of two episodes of Locklisted the podcast where we talk about the books and films and music that we've been listening to over the last couple of weeks