Reading this first half of Seeing is a struggle. Saramago's texts look intimidating; his long paragraphs are punctuated only with commas and full stops, and it is often difficult to work out who is speaking. The narrator switches between past and present tenses, between detached observer and satirical commentator, dwells at length on the use of common phrases, digresses and apologizes for his digressions. What might be thought of as fundamental pleasures of the novel -lyricism, character development, phrase-making -are almost completely absent. This is a fairly typical sentence, about the reaction of the press:
On the one hand it was their duty, as obvious as it was elementary, to condemn, with an energy tinged with civic indignation, in editorials and in specially commissioned opinion pieces, the unexpected and irresponsible behaviour of an electorate who, apparently rendered blind to the superior interests of the nation as a whole by some strange and dangerous perversion, had complicated public life to an unprecedented degree, corralling it into a dark alleyway from which not even the brightest spark was able to see a way out.
Like many of Saramago's sentences this one sprouts clauses and subclauses like a creeper spreading though the undergrowth. There is a suspicion of satire and a mixture of bureaucratic and colloquial vocabulary, an obvious play on the word "blind" and a metaphor which does not quite work (can an abstraction -"public life" -be corralled into a dark alleyway?) The tone, rendered scrupulously by the translator, Margaret Jull Costa, is hard to describe and is anyway continually changing. What, after a while, seems obvious is that this is not meant to be easy to read. It would be too trite to argue that the reader is being schooled to be as suspicious of the forms of conventional novels as the novel is suspicious of the forms of contemporary democracy. Perhaps better to say that it suits Saramago's purposes not to allow readers to get too comfortable.
Seeing is a sequel to Saramago's disturbing Blindness (1997), in which a contagious plague gradually sends the inhabitants of a nameless country blind.
Blindness follows the plight of a group of these blind men and women as they are guided by "the doctor's wife", who alone keeps her sight. There is a productive friction between the pull of the narrative and the quirky manner of its telling.
It is as though the reader were being dragged painfully through a forest of signs that declare: "This is not just a story" and "What's all this really about?". Both novels -in Portuguese the titles are "An Essay on Blindness" and "An Essay on Seeing" -are fables about the way society is organized and how power is exercised, though Blindness is a tragedy and Seeing is a darkly comic farce. But where the style of the earlier novel skilfully prompts reflection, in the sequel it risks alienating the reader.
This would be a shame: the second half of Seeing is less hard work, with much narrative tension and a sympathetic protagonist. Following the receipt of the letter, three policemen are sent undercover inside the besieged capital to investigate the matter. After interrogating the letter-writer and the suspects he has identified, the conscientious superintendent finds himself in an impossible predicament. The exchanges between the precise and methodical superintendent and the quick-witted doctor and his wife are compelling. The policeman is endearingly keen to be exact. "In my profession, it's not unusual for diagnostic errors to occur simply because of some linguistic imprecision", he tells the doctor's wife. But he finds himself caught in a system which is less concerned with diagnostic errors than with public perceptions and self- preservation. The sergeant and inspector who accompany him are also comically obsessed with their position in the hierarchy, and soon the superintendent is an isolated man. The ending is tense and delicately balanced.
