Books & Poetry

For a Nobel Prize-winning novelist, Saramago does high concept more like a science fiction specialist. In 1998’s ‘Blindness’, an entire city lost its vision; the city of ‘Seeing’ is similarly left in the dark after 83 per cent of the voters cast blank ballots in local elections, plunging the state into confusion. Given contemporary Western disengagement with politics, this is a terrific conceit, but the focus of Saramago’s novel isn’t on the motivation of the voters – disillusionment needs no manifesto, it seems – but on the reaction of the unnamed government, which considers the voters’ behaviour to be an act of terrorism and behaves accordingly.

While ‘Blindness’s pessimism focused on the descent into brutality of a debased people, ‘Seeing’ attacks the state, whose belief in democracy is shown as a fig leaf, masking contempt for the people; Saramago’s politicians regard the voting process as much a part of population control as the secret police and propaganda (although whether we need to be lectured on state oppression by a member of the Communist Party is another matter). Typically, he never lets on where or when the action is taking place (although there’s an intriguing, late reference to Baghdad), and this sense of fable is enhanced by Saramago’s hallucinatory style: sentences stretch for paragraphs and paragraphs stretch for pages, with most punctuation eschewed, leaving just commas, capital letters and full stops to steer the reader through dense blocks of mesmerising prose. Stylistically, politically and intellectually stimulating, this is a formidable piece of work.