At the heart of Vigil, George Saunders’s slim second novel, lies a conceit. It is the final night in the life of KJ Boone, an octogenarian oil magnate whose business empire was built on climate denial, political lobbying and the plunder of ecological commons.

Into this setting drifts Jill “Doll” Blaine, an afterlife agent charged with easing souls across the threshold. Part death doula, part cosmic bureaucrat, Blaine is an expert at this. She had died at 22 herself, in a car bomb explosion meant for her policeman husband. Since then, she has shepherded well over 300 people to the other side. Boone, however, presents a particular challenge: how does one soothe a man whose life’s work has contributed to planetary harm on a staggering scale and who has no regrets about it?

Unfolding over a single night and structured like a metaphysical debate, this sets the stage for the reckoning. Jill believes in mercy. Others in the spirit world disagree. A French engineer, undone by an industrial disaster traceable to Boone’s empire, presses for confrontation. He is joined by a plethora of spectral creatures demanding accountability. But no moral epiphany awaits Boone.

On his deathbed, he remains intransigent — oh the audacity of those “libdopes” to try to pull him down — free of compunction and supremely secure in his self-importance. “A steady flow of satisfaction, even triumph, coursed through him, regarding all he had managed to see, cause and create.” Vigil asks instead, what if some harms cannot be catalysed into wisdom? What if death offers no absolution? What if our craving for redemption is itself a kind of vanity?

These are urgent, incisive questions. Vigil is an American novel distinctly conscious of its inheritance. Amid heightened climate crisis, the US has dismantled domestic climate action efforts, including doing away with the 2009 EPA “endangerment finding” on greenhouse gases, withdrawing support for renewable energy technologies, and pausing Inflation Reduction Act funds. It has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement, calling global warming a hoax. This is a world Boone would fit effortlessly in and it gives Saunders a necessary in into the big moral dilemmas of the time.

And yet, the book feels somewhat contrived. It settles on the right issues, asks the right questions, reaches for the right answers. But it tries a bit too hard. Saunders’s satire, honed over decades of examining the human capacity for self-delusion, has lost none of its bite.

It saves the novel from becoming sanctimonious but only just, and that’s a shame. Vigil feels somehow diminished beside its predecessor, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), Saunders’s Booker Prize-winning novel. A choral meditation on grief, Lincoln in the Bardo had rendered the liminal space between life and death both anarchic and tender. Vigil’s tone is more prosecutorial, as if it wishes to strip the afterlife of its consolations and examine what moral residue remains. It revisits the metaphysical waiting room but this time the question it asks is whether we deserve to be comforted at all.

It is a question that Jill, too, grapples with. In her, the author locates the fragile persistence of care in an otherwise transactional world. Fussy, kind, faintly bewildered, Jill is a marvellous creation, providing the book its emotional ballast. She offsets Boone, whose obduracy means the novel’s dramatic engine refuses to fully kickstart. Saunders’s refusal to grant him redemption is ethically bracing but narratively static. Conflict requires movement and Vigil ends up circling its central dilemma without deepening it.

In his 2013 commencement speech, ‘Failures of Kindness’, at Syracuse University, Saunders spoke of the things that make life worthwhile — kindness, empathy, curiosity: “Do those things that incline you toward the big questions and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial”.

These are the qualities that have animated Saunders’s own work and Vigil is no exception. It is, by turns, comic, uncanny and tender, with passages of bruising beauty. Yet, it can also feel frustratingly distant. For all its ingenuity, Vigil never quite summons the emotional momentum that animates Saunders’s earlier triumphs.