Booker Prize winner George Saunders: ‘Who wants to read a climate change novel?’

Before he became a Booker Prize-winning novelist, George Saunders was an oil man. He found himself in the industry in the early 1980s, in his 20s, working as a geophysical engineer. “It was a great adventure,” he tells me. “I was in Indonesia, and we were being allowed into these rainforests where no one had ever set foot.” His politics were “a little Republican” back then: “I think I voted for Reagan.”

Saunders is now 67, and long since a liberal as well as a writer. He looks back on those adventures as practically “imperialism”. But, four decades later, he’s returning to the well. Vigil, his new novel, tackles one of the hot-button issues of our time – “Big Oil”, and the damage its pursuit has caused. It’s narrated by the ghost of Jill “Doll” Blaine, a 22-year-old car-bomb victim, who is sent from on high to the bedside of a dying man, the wealthy oil boss KJ Boone, to comfort him and help him find peace. At the same time, another spirit, a tortured Frenchman, tries instead to lead Boone “to contrition, shame and self-loathing”. Boone’s alleged sin? To have misdirected, sown doubt and obscured the truth about what fossil fuels have done to the earth, a crime against generations yet to be born.