SEEING. By Jose Saramago, Translated by Margaret Jull Costa 352pp. Harvill.
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At first, the returning officer thinks that the low turnout may be a consequence of the heavy rain. But it soon becomes apparent that something more unusual has occurred, and only a sudden rush of voters in the last hour of the day restores a semblance of normality. However, when the votes cast in the capital city are counted, more than 70 per cent are seen to be blank.
The government is perplexed, as are all three parties, the party on the right, the party in the middle and the party on the left. The election is held again, according to national law. This time 83 per cent of the votes cast are blank.
The citizens of the capital have apparently rejected en masse the political options available to them.
Threatened by this unprecedented display of public disaffection the government debate their response. The nameless ministers personify their offices: the minister of defence is belligerent (he sees the casting of blank votes as "a depth charge launched against the system"), the minister for justice is fair-minded, the minister of culture mutters about "the semantic process". The agents of the interior minister are sent to gather intelligence but none is forthcoming: the population remain collectively tight-lipped.
Tensions mount in the cabinet and the decision is taken to withdraw from the capital, which will be placed under a state of siege. When, argues the prime minister, the rebellious citizens can no longer stand "the isolation, the indignity, the contempt, when life within the city becomes a chaos, then its guilty inhabitants will come to us hanging their heads and begging our forgiveness". As the convoy of cars leaves the city, the streets are illuminated from every facing window, "letting out a great river of light like a flood". The government depart even more ill at ease, along with the civil servants and police, leaving the citizens to reflect and mend their ways.
And so the first half of Saramago's political fable proceeds, a gently satirical bureaucratic farce. Nothing the government can do provokes the citizens, even when a bomb is set off in the city centre and blamed on the "rebels".
(This outrage causes the leader of the city council, one of a pair of conscientious men who realize their impotence, to resign.) With the government becoming ever more desperate, and the ministers of justice and culture having resigned, a letter reaches the authorities. The writer, though not by any means a "grass", wishes to inform the authorities that during the epidemic of blindness that seized the country (the subject of the earlier novel) one woman did not go blind, that she committed a murder during this period and that perhaps she might be responsible for the blank votes.
