"They converge at the deathbed of an oil man, KJ Boone. He's a postwar bootstrapper: long-lived, filthy rich and mightily pleased with himself. A steady flow of satisfaction, even triumph, coursed through him, regarding all he had managed to see, cause and create. Boone is calm in his final hours, enviably so. He seems destined to die exactly as he lived, untroubled by self-reflection. But as his body falters, his mind becomes permeable to ghosts, and they have work to do."
"Our narrator, Jill Blaine, is a spectral death doula. She has helped hundreds of souls ease their way out of their bodies, and she's good at it, in part because no one did the job for her (her own ending was explosive). But Boone is a thorny, unrepentant fellow; certain of his own brilliance, and his exemption from the petty scruples of mere earthlings. What is the doula's role here: to comfort the dying man, or correct the moral record? When does mercy become complicity?"
The setting is an indeterminate space between life and death, comedy and grief, where the living are largely absent and the dead are meddlesome and chatty. They converge at the deathbed of KJ Boone, a long-lived, filthy-rich postwar oil man confident in his brilliance and untroubled by self-reflection. As Boone's body falters his mind becomes permeable to ghosts intent on prompting acknowledgment of his fossil-fuelled profiteering and climate-denial harms. Jill Blaine, a spectral death doula whose own ending was explosive, must decide whether to comfort the dying man or correct the moral record, raising urgent questions about mercy, complicity and sympathy for a Scrooge-like figure.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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