Book review: George Saunders’s Vigil and Matthew Kressel’s The Rainseekers are sci-fi treats

Vigil
George Saunders, Bloomsbury

In general, I am not a fan of novellas (or short novels). Just as I am sinking into them, they finish. However, while interesting people keep writing interesting-sounding works like these, I feel obliged to keep reading them, and this week I will be featuring not one, but two of these relatively slender tomes.

First, there is Vigil by Booker prize-winning author George Saunders, whose novel Lincoln in the Bardo was a global hit. In Vigil, the ghost of a woman called Jill “Doll” Blaine comes plummeting down to Earth to oversee the final hours of an oil tycoon named K.J. Boone.

Jill’s job, as she sees it, is to comfort. She likes to help a soul find peace with what they have done. But it turns out that Boone needs no comfort. He is quite happy with the decisions he has made, even though his life as an oil magnate, inevitably, involved so many lies and so much environmental destruction.

The story takes place during the last few hours of the tycoon’s life. Other ghosts turn up, as do family members. All come in search of some kind of moment of reckoning with the tycoon. Jill, our narrator, frustrated by Boone, ends up flitting to and fro, visiting elements of her own life and death before returning to her post at his bedside.

As you would expect from a famed wordsmith, every line of Saunders’s work is fresh and gorgeous. He is an enemy of the dull and the clichéd.

But ultimately, I found myself unsatisfied by Vigil‘s denouement. I think I expected to gain more understanding of Boone’s heart. Or, perhaps foolishly, I wanted the same reckoning that everyone in the story wanted. I also felt Jill was the most interesting character in the book and I would have liked to have spent more time exploring her tragic backstory.

However, no one can deny Saunders’s brilliance and artistry, or the relevance of the issues he is exploring in Vigil. I think it is probably a book that deserves to be read at least twice.

The Rainseekers
Matthew Kressel, Tor Publishing

Now on to The Rainseekers by Matthew Kressel. This is essentially a series of short stories, but with a narrative arc running through them. The chief protagonist, Sakunja Salazar, is an influencer turned journalist who is living on Mars at a time when the planet’s terraforming efforts are finally bearing fruit.

There is now open water on the Red Planet and, at certain times, you can even breathe air, unless a rush of low-oxygen air blows in to ruin the moment. Sakunja is taking part in a buggy ride deep into the Martian wilderness with a group that intends to be the first to witness rain on Mars. It is a lovely and poetic idea.

Along the way, Sakunja interviews her fellow rainseekers, asking them about their lives and reasons for wanting to see Martian rain. Each one of these tourists’ stories contributes to the over-arching story of the group travelling into the wilderness.

Kressel is very good at telling people’s stories, powerfully and in just a few words, and that gives the novella some heft. The stories build into a vivid picture of the solar system as it is in Kressel’s vision of the future.

I think the least successful bit of the book, for me, was Sakunja herself, who never managed to excite my interest or sympathy. However, this is an enjoyable and very human companion piece to terraforming classics such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars trilogy.

Emily also recommends…

Juice
Tim Winton, Pan Macmillan

If you are interested in oil tycoons and their role in climate change, this book is for you. We travel a long way into the future in this novel, but it turns out there are still people alive who can be punished for what went wrong. It is a terrific piece of work – and this month’s pick for the New Scientist Book Club!

Emily H. Wilson is the author of the Sumerians series (Inanna, Gilgamesh and Ninshubar, all published by Titan) and she is currently working on her first sci-fi novel. She is a former editor of New Scientist and you can follow her on Instagram @emilyhwilson1