THREE beautifully polished novels have arrived for spring. Booker Prize-winning Vigil by George Saunders (Bloomsbury, £18.99 (); 978-1-526-62430-7) takes us to the bedside of a dying man, weaving in meditations on a life well, or badly, lived and the climate crisis.
While the topics are heavy, Saunders’s cast of afterlife guides, led by Jill “Doll” Blaine, make contemplation of death and living a witty and affectionate affair. When a fellow spirit, the Frenchman, hoping to move the dying oil titan K. J. Boone to contrition over masking fossil fuels’ environmental effect, declares “I want to be transparent,” Jill responds: “You already are.”
Boone has ascended from a Midwest childhood in which the kitchen smelt of lard and bleach to owning “a second home, in Colorado. And a third, in Hawaii. A fourth, in Key West.” Saunders balances this American dream or nightmare with Jill’s celebratory yearning for the pleasures of her brief time on earth, 1956-76, including baked beans, driving, movies, and family gatherings. On her 343rd mission to take a “charge” to the next life, Jill describes those still enjoying this life’s everyday pleasures as “lucky ducks”.
On the surface, the 20-year-old K-pop idol Yosep has all the luck, revelling in wealth, fame, and an adoring swarm of female fans wherever he goes. What happens when four devoted fans decide to revise the terms of trade between idol and follower is the subject of Holy Boy by Lee Heejoo (Picador, £14.99 (£13.49); 978-1-0350-7643-7).
With a nod to Stephen King’s Misery, Heejoo’s first novel to be translated into English from Korean explores what happens when devotion becomes unhinged. Holy Boy also holds up a mirror to contemporary Korea, where Nami, Mihee, Ahnna, and Saju initially fight between themselves for scraps of status in the world of superfandom, before kidnapping enables them to turn the tables. The deft translation uses a comic-horror tone to chart not just the dark side of fandom, but the identity-enhancing aspects of being a fan, and entertainment’s knowing exploitation of those who are looking for a way to belong.
In 1953, David Fletcher is sure that he belongs in a Roman Catholic church, as his ordination in Rome forms the opening scene in A Private Man by Stephanie Sy-Quia (Picador, £16.99 (£15.29); 978-1-0350-5261-5). A decade later, David sees Margaret, a brightly dressed academic, standing out against a teaching staff of nuns, and all his certainty begins to crumble. Based on the story of the author’s grandparents, Sy-Quia’s restrained, chiselled prose will delight admirers of Elizabth Bowen and Anita Brookner, where the orderliness of the surface underlines the emotional churning beneath.