Seeing (Ensaio sobre a Lucidez)

Not ultimately one of those sequels that matches or even improves upon the original, though I somehow doubt that this was always intended as a sequel. I'd wager that José Saramago conceived of his blank ballot scenario before he spotted the neat symmetries it would avail him of. For if in Blindness his characters had shuffled from darkness towards light and here in Seeing the trajectory is duly reversed, and what starts off as a fairly jaunty satire, ends with a bleakness that cast a gloom over my memories of the earlier work.

The new novel might be called Seeing, but the allegory at its heart is not that much more self-explanatory than the previous one. "There are none so blind as those who will not see", the author reminds us, and later has a character note how some individuals do eventually manage to attain a moment of painful lucidez in their political lives. "When we are born, when we enter this world, it's as if we signed a pact for the rest of our life, but a day may come when we will ask ourselves, Who signed this on my behalf?"

In Blindness the situation in this same city was very simple: Day of the Triffids without the killer plants. According to Michael Pye this was "as high concept as any George Romero movie, to which it comes embarrassingly close at times." The crisis here appears more subtle. A local election is held and 73% of the ballots cast in the capital turn out to be blanks. A "dissolute use of the vote" according to the ruling right-wing party, who have the election re-taken only to find that now 80% of voters have chosen to expose this hidden fault in democracy.

The government starts to panic, ironically using the police force to encourage strikes and then faking a terrorist atrocity before deciding to abandon the capital completely. A state of seige ensues, even though some recognise that it is probably "nonsense to take away the rights of someone whose only crime had been to make use of those rights."

We know this is the same city that suffered the "white blindness" because it becomes a topic around the cabinet table. At one point Saramago playfully suggests that it's his own country of Portugal he has in mind here, only to later state that the city has never suffered a major earthquake, which rules out Lisbon.

Rather than attempt to resolve this intriguing scenario the second half of the novel digs up the "doctor's wife" and the other characters we may know from Blindness and kind of finishes off their story instead, without really adding greatly to the meaning of that fable.

Anyway, I'm used to Saramago's style by now and appreciative of the surreptitious poetry his narrators are fond of delivering. In Seeing he gives us a taxi driver that claims to use his mirror to look into his passengers' souls, insurgents that carry the white flag as a symbol of solidarity and rebellion not surrender, and lines like this: "No doubt our finest torture specialists kiss their children when they get home, and some may even cry at the cinema."

Saramago would probably be a shoe-in for the title of World's Greatest Living Author if only because, unlike the other likely candidates, he is still churning out novels regularly in his eighties. Somehow I'd think I'd rather have someone like Haruki Murakami round for dinner thoug; it might be hard to get much out of him, but with Saramago the opposite problem would surely apply. Like García Márquez Saramago is an old warhorse of the totalitarian left and could easily spoil the mood with his entrenched views! You'd have to keep him off politics at all costs...get him to talk about his dog etc.