George Saunders’s​ novel Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize in 2017, featured a cast who were mostly dead, though still conversational, and his new novel, Vigil, revisits the device – one that goes back in American literature at least as far as 1915 and Edgar Lee Masters’s poetry collection Spoon River Anthology. In that book a town’s dead inhabitants testify from the cemetery about, and often against, the community in which they lived. Jill ‘Doll’ Blaine, the protagonist of Vigil, was born in 1954 and died in 1976, but she has been busy since then, attending the deathbeds of those referred to as her ‘charges’, more than three hundred of them. Her new assignment, the self-made plutocrat K.J. Boone, is a tough nut to crack, unable to prevent her from entering ‘the orb of his thoughts’ but refusing to give her much head space. He holds fast to his idea of himself as a pioneer and a hero.

The words ‘ghost’ and ‘angel’ are not used in the book to identify Jill and her ilk (‘of our ilk’ is a recurring phrase) but it’s hard not to see them as hybrids of these two entities. A ghost is the psychic residue of a life, often unaware of its death (as is the case in Lincoln in the Bardo), but likely to have unfinished business with the living. An angel has no human past but is sent from outside our world to effect an announcement or an intervention. Jill and her ilk are set to work by a beneficent God after a process called ‘elevation’, which seems to combine ghost and angel – the shadow and the messenger – into a single being, its presence detectable by animals but not by people.

Films with a fantasy element usually explain the set-up early and clearly. The game can’t start until you know the rules. Peter Carter, falling to earth in his burning plane, accepts his designated death, but falls in love with the radio operator June and thereby somehow falls past it. The rest of A Matter of Life and Death follows from this anomalous case of physical (rather than psychic) survival, a filing error in the bureaucracy of the afterlife. Sam in Ghost, looking down at his own corpse after an attack in the street, comes to realise that his job is still to protect his girlfriend, Molly. He loves her too much to be able to leave her. In Vigil, Jill’s marriage was loving, but she doesn’t stay on earth for the sake of her policeman husband, Lloyd. She is familiar with the whereabouts and condition of her corpse, torn apart when a car bomb meant for Lloyd killed her instead, but she has never in the half-century since her death (the action of the book is in the present day) taken an interest in how he is getting along. This is presumably because of the partial selflessness imposed by elevation, with the angel having the upper hand over the ghost.

Jill has some sort of access to her own past without being able fully to inhabit it. This is conveyed typographically by putting its elements in inverted commas, a formal device that irritates the eye, accustomed as it is to punctuation that aims to smooth the experience of reading rather than roughen it up. She remembers, for instance, ‘lying in “antique four-poster”, purchased by “Mother”, “on credit”, at “Sears”, her “favourite store”, while imagining being kissed by “Phil Everly”, “pop star”’. At least there’s no confusion with quoted speech, since Saunders dispenses with inverted commas for that purpose, an understandable decision when his angel-ghosts can simply flow into the consciousnesses they encounter.

But why, and how, did Jill stay? The rules are hard to grasp. It’s not that they need to be explicitly stated, though the Handbook for the Recently Deceased, found by the central couple in Beetlejuice when they return, drenched and baffled, after their car has plunged into a river, is an elegant way of establishing the inner logic of the fiction, its cosmology. The cosmology of Beetlejuice, disconcertingly, has neither heaven nor hell, no God, no Devil. It’s all limbo.

In Vigil, not everyone who remains on earth posthumously is elevated. Jill encounters an ill-assorted couple who, unlike her, are tied to the place where they died in different epochs (‘I got hit and killed just there’) and can only rehearse their uninspiring experiences to each other:

At first her story completely bored me, said William.

Likewise, said Clyda.

Because it was not my story, said William.

Same, said Clyda.

Then, gradually, we learned, said William. We became, with time, nominally more able to endure listening to each other.

And now we hardly mind it at all.

This is one of several exchanges in the book that resembles a tired music-hall act, though it takes a Beckett to drain all the obvious vitality out of a vaudeville routine while leaving it with the ghost of a snap. William and Clyda don’t seem bright enough for elevation, which perhaps depends on a sort of civil service entrance exam – in Beetlejuice it was suicides who administered the afterlife, their attempt to escape the system merely guaranteeing them an eternity of office work.

Are William and Clyda of another ilk from Jill and her co-workers? No, same ilk. So what’s the process that allows a dead individual to remain on earth? ‘One must want desperately to appear and, even so, might only partly succeed: one might arrive in waves, or in a diminished state. One’s appearance might be distorted by detritus from one’s psyche or the manner of one’s passing. Even having succeeded, one might fade away before one’s desires were fully realised.’ But this refers to the origin of an entity, not to its later appearances. Those of Jill’s ilk have no difficulty in moving from place to place. Jill’s own experience bears no resemblance to this account. She was projected away from the scene of her accident, so that ‘as if flung by an invisible hand, ‘“I” kept going, across town … being guided, it felt, to some specific place,’ which turns out to be the consciousness of the man who had planted the bomb. She was trapped there until she learned what it was like to be him, at which point she received her mission:

You cannot free him.

But you might comfort him.

I felt a new and powerful truth being beamed directly into me, by a vast, beneficent God, in the form of this unyielding directive:

Comfort.

No desperation was involved in her case – she seems to have been fast-tracked. There wasn’t even a moment of decision between leaving the world and staying in it. When, late in the book, Jill encounters her grandmother, the old lady suggests she should move on.

Maybe it’s time, Grandma said, indicating my grave with her cane …

No, I said.

Why not, Grandma said. What keeps you here, Doll?

What keeps you here? I said.

She leaned forward to answer, as if about to tell me some long-kept secret.

Then did a little fart, like in the old days, so we might part on good terms.

No answer there.

The ‘comforting’ Jill offers to the dying is an odd procedure, always the same in outline. She tells her charges that they couldn’t have acted any differently. Their choices had been so restricted that ‘the whole game amounted to a sort of lavish jailing.’ At this point, the faint whiff of A Christmas Carol that has clung to the book disperses, since no change of heart is expected of any of Jill’s charges, even a calcified Scrooge like Boone. It is more like an AA interaction, with Boone’s sponsor urging him to see that he was helpless all along. AA, however, is posited on the need to produce and consolidate change. How does it render the dying a significant service to tell them that they never had free will, when they’re just about to meet a higher power? Won’t that beneficent God tell them the same thing?

Comfort in the Bible is a fine thing in most contexts, except perhaps the most famous: Job’s comforters aren’t comforters at all but tempters, encouraging him to curse God and die. Whose work is Jill doing by standing in the way of repentance? Hers is not the only approach to the mission. More than one operative can be assigned to a case, though there is no supervision in the field – which makes these entities sound like a cell of spies, deep undercover. Also assigned to Boone is a Frenchman, who advertises his Francophone credentials by exclaiming ‘Quelle horreur!’ or whistling the ‘Marseillaise’, and is as keen to secure a confession of guilt as Jill is to head one off. His exaggerated Frenchness might be a tribute to the fop played by Marius Goring in A Matter of Life and Death, dispatched from the black and white upper realm to retrieve Peter Carter, delivering the line ‘One is starved for Technicolor, up there’ with magnificent affectation as he feasts his eyes on a rose bush.

Jill and the Frenchman are hardly a team, though between them they stage a version of a good cop/bad cop interrogation. The Frenchman psychically passes over to Jill a sample of consciousness, a sort of subjective recording, that he thinks will shake the old man to his core. Jill squanders it, apparently not knowing, even after more than three hundred assignments, that recordings of this sort can only be played once. If the analogies being offered here (AA sponsor, undercover operatives, police interrogation tag-team) seem scattered and unfocused then they do justice to the book.

Jill and the Frenchman are joined at Boone’s bedside by a double act ‘of our ilk’, who seem to have known him in their lifetimes:

Anyway, said G.

Any-old-hoo, said R.

Just dropping by to say thanks, said G.

To our friend K.J., said R.

For the funding, said G.

Thanks for the funding, K.J., said R.

The surreptitious, secretive funding, said G.

Which dared not speak its name, said R.

That the interchangeable R. & G., courtiers whose homage seems to mask a threat, are neither Shakespearean nor Stoppardian figures is shown by the way the scene develops. They reproduce anally, their offspring immediately doing the same:

Replicas of the replicas began dropping from the rears of the initial replicas and these secondary replicas became full-sized and began dropping out tertiary replicas, who also grew until the room was so packed with versions of the original R. and G., all talking at once, that several of the replicas were nudged out through the wall and, while still in the process of introducing themselves, tumbled down into the yard below.

This grotesque scene goes into reverse two pages later, with the original R. and G. ‘wincing somewhat at the discomfort’ of dozens of replicas abrading the psychic sphincter on their way back to base.

The rules keep being modified. Ten pages from the end of the book, Jill spots a pair of pronghorns of her ilk, unable to progress to glory hundreds of years after their death by mauling. It must be common for a prey animal like the pronghorn to be traumatised at the moment of death, but this is the first indication that the world is cluttered with animal phantoms as well as the human ones.

Circumstantial evidence (defective internal logic, uncontrolled tone, bizarreness for its own sake) suggests that Vigil is an attempt at a comic novel by someone without much of a sense of humour, though it’s true that several successful books – Confessions of Felix Krull, A House for Mr Biswas – correspond to this description. If Vigil ever forms part of the vast swathe of writing used to train artificial intelligence then the robot scanners won’t learn much about organising a narrative, but I dare say that’s the least of our worries. What is really going on, at least in Saunders’s head, is almost unimaginably different. He is trying to address an overwhelmingly serious and important subject, the threat of human extinction as a result of climate change.

K.J. Boone is an oil tycoon who not only represents an ecocidal industry but delivered a keynote speech at a conference in Aarhus in 1997 that gave colour to climate scepticism – shortly after it the US withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol. R. and G. were scientists who sold their integrity in exchange for funding, corroborating a complacency they knew to be false. Even the cartoon Frenchman can be identified, on the basis of his remarks about having ‘had a hand in the invention of the beast’, with Jean Joseph Étienne Lenoir, who invented an internal combustion engine in 1858. This explains his first appearance in ‘the rough garb of mechanic or railway engineer’.

The book’s cosmology doesn’t harmonise with its message, and even contests it. If the Earth is not our only home then the viability of the planet recedes in importance. A belief in the next world, and the possibility of judgment there, may encourage moral scruple without inspiring respect for the precariousness of our environment. The majority of believers in an afterlife have tended to regard the world, and everything in it, as an entitlement rather than a sacred trust.

Boone, understandably, resents his demonisation as ‘the single worst agent in the monumental and criminal effort to deny blah blah blah’, and his arguments, though self-protective, do have some force. Not everyone who goes on marches to protect the environment gets there by carbon-neutral means, and all of them would struggle to keep their lives on track without fossil fuels. (That’s not the point.) Boone’s psychology is resolutely one-dimensional, though authoritatively channelled through Jill, as she taps into his thoughts:

Nobody could know what it was like, being him.

Nobody.

How delicious, how perfect.

Nobody … What he was, they were not, and never would be; where he’d been, they hadn’t been (and couldn’t go); what he knew, they’d never know.

This expression of omnipotence seems unconvincingly serene – do plutocrats ever lose their edge of paranoia? Are they ever satisfied with what they have? It’s hard to think of examples.

Boone’s daughter, Julia, might have given Saunders a chance to find some much needed nuance, as a person who didn’t forge her own destiny but had to make a life of her own within the distortions of her father’s. He lets the opportunity go by:

She believed in this country, and in positive values and taking responsibility for oneself, like he’d taught her, and saw zero use in complaining or looking only at the negative side of things or pissing and moaning about every little hardship the way the libdopes tended to do, as if nothing in life was fun or beautiful or a cause for joy and everything was a terrible dang guilty burden to bear. (And yes, Daddy: she and her church friends used ‘libdope’ now, not ‘libtard’, not because of p.c. but because ‘libdope’ seemed somehow kinder, more in keeping with the teachings.)

Of course there is a genre – satire – that doesn’t punish a certain crudity, and even rewards it, but this is the one thing satire cannot be: insipid.

There is an impalpable entity hardly mentioned in Vigil that has more impact on our world than ghosts or angels, either singly or combined: the corporation. The legal systems of a number of countries grant corporations the status of people in important respects. Under US law, corporations are entitled under the First Amendment to unlimited political spending. Seeking to influence the body politic by funding propaganda campaigns counts as protected speech.

The Frenchman’s first move in trying to rouse Boone’s conscience was to show him specimens of birds – the hooded warbler, the bobolink – that have been driven to extinction. Boone isn’t impressed, as the orb of his thoughts makes clear: ‘There were still birds, there’d always be birds, birds bred like goddamn rats.’ It’s true that other species become extinct quite straightforwardly, like small businesses unable to pay their invoices, while we humans, with our great talent for creative accounting, can juggle losses almost indefinitely, making the balance sheet look healthy whatever the underlying truth. Our species will become extinct in the way that Enron did. A corporation that seemed sound turned out to have lost all its solidity long ago, becoming more and more like a confidence trick that deceived the tricksters themselves.

If a corporation is a sort of person, what sort of person is it? Given that a corporation is required to consider only its own benefit, the answer would have to be a psychopath. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Boone’s company, like its competitors, did pay attention to the dire warnings of environmental collapse, despite its denials of knowledge and attempts to discredit those sounding the alarm. The company took action, but only to raise its drilling platforms, so it could continue to operate while sea levels rose. This is the only effective moment in Vigil, a solitary sharp edge in an insubstantial book.