George Saunders is at his most lively in the company of the dead. At ease with ghosts. In the 2022 Booker-winning Lincoln in the Bardo, Abraham Lincoln mourns his young son in a graveyard surrounded by a clamorous crowd of the newly deceased trying to be helpful. Grief, handled with sweet humour.

But Saunders has not always been so gentle. His acclaimed first collection of stories, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline (1997), featured a landscape of grotesque theme parks populated by corpses, enslaved humans and ghosts. Even then, compassion edged in, rubbing shoulders with absurdist humour.  Saunders is a cradle Catholic, and the liturgy frequently surfaces in his stories; but his Catholicism has a humanist face, a vein of kindness running through his work. He is now a student of Buddhism.

Vigil mingles life and the afterlife from the start, with spirits from time past playing their parts in a wild ride through recent history, otherworldly reunions and good and evil – suitably big themes for one of America’s most distinguished and original writers. Saunders embraces his subjects in their entirety and can switch in a blink from a pratfall to a chilling riff on the intoxication of power.

The first dead soul we meet is Jill ‘Doll’ Blaine, a comforter of those on the threshold of life and death, offering them a last-minute opportunity for repentance – absolution without the holy oil. Here she is in the opening line, like Ariel, hurtling through space, demonstrating the awkward practicalities of attaining human form as she crashes through ceilings, fountains and other inconvenient barriers, to the bedside of her latest charge:

What a lovely home I found myself plummeting toward, acquiring, as I fell, arms, hands, legs, feet, all of which, as usual, became more substantial with each passing second.

Jill reassembles in a beige skirt, pink blouse and black pumps, the outfit she was wearing when she met her violent end. Her new client – No. 343 – does not welcome her. K.J. Boone, an oil tycoon and one of the richest men in the world, spurns her offer of consolation: he has no regrets. In fact, there’s a sense of triumph for what he’s achieved, rising from the humblest beginnings in a Wyoming shack to worldwide influence: he spoke and markets moved.

Mischievously, Saunders lets his characters reveal themselves in the banality of their own words. Wallowing in his wealth, Boone boasts how he sent his parents round the world:

The Holy Land. By way of Paris. Only the best hotels. Cars, tour guides, the whole enchilada. His mother had once had coffee with Charlton Heston.

As Boone teeters on the cusp of mortality, people from his past come and go, not all of them friendly, replaying painful scenes, paths taken, betrayals – it’s time for a reckoning. And while Jill tussles with the body and mind of the sick man, from the mansion next door come sounds of riotous merriment:  a wedding is being celebrated. Life and death in head-on collision.

The demise of a mega wealthy oil magnate lacks the heartbreak of a grieving father: Lincoln was about healing and release; Vigil gradually swivels the focus from the dead man to Jill as she revisits her own life and its abrupt end, when a blissful marriage was beginning. We care about Jill, one of our better angels; but it’s not happy ever after for her just yet. There’s more work ahead, as we glimpse what’s coming next.

Vigil is a Christmas Carol for our times, targeting corporate greed, consumerism and climate change. Does it veer into preachy territory? Occasionally. But with Saunders in charge, blessedly, the laughs keep elbowing in.