*disclaimer: this review contains a relatively minor spoiler in the fourth paragraph after the quotation.
‘The green light came on at last, the cars moved off briskly, but then it became clear that not all of them were equally quick off the mark. The car at the head of the middle lane had stopped, there must be some mechanical fault, a loose accelerator pedal, the gear lever that has stuck, a problem with the suspension, jammed breaks, a breakdown in the electric circuit […] the cars behind him frantically sound their horns. Some drivers have already got out of their cars, prepared to push the stranded vehicle to a spot where it will not hold up the traffic, they beat furiously on the closed windows, the man inside turns his head in their direction, first to one side then the other, he is clearly shouting something, to judge by the movements of his mouth he appears to be repeating some words, not one but three, as turns out to be the case when someone finally manages to open the door, I am blind.’
A driver waiting at a set of traffic lights loses his vision with no obvious explanation. The good Samaritan who drove this man home goes blind a day later. Soon after, the ophthalmologist who examined the first blind man can no longer see, along with all of his patients that were in the waiting room that day. In a matter of weeks, virtually everyone in the unnamed city is plagued by a milky white haze of blindness.
Instead of focusing on the impact of the epidemic on a large scale, Saramago concentrates on a handful of characters that are some of the first people to go blind. The majority of the book’s action takes place in an abandoned asylum where those afflicted, as well as potential carriers, are quarantined by the government. Anyone who attempts to escape will be shot by armed guards patrolling the building’s exterior. Living conditions in the former asylum rapidly deteriorate, following a large influx of new internees. Food deliveries are scarce, bringing the inhabitants to the brink of starvation. The situation worsens when an armed gang of thugs begin stockpiling food and forcing the others to exchange their material possessions (and later their bodies) for food. When a fire brings the asylum to the ground, the internees realise that the army is no longer keeping watch over them, for they too have fallen victim to the contagion (sidenote: you may be wondering why I didn’t say this paragraph contained spoilers at the start of this review. This is because the blurb of Blindness is a bit overzealous in revealing the book’s plot (!) so what I have said so far isn't actually all that revealing). Now free to roam the dilapidated city, the protagonists band together in order to survive and to search for food, water, shelter, and their loved ones.
Throughout Blindness, commas replace full stops, speech marks, and other standard punctuation. This means that a whole paragraph can be comprised of a single sentence. Personally, I liked the book’s unconventional style. You get used to it surprisingly quickly, although I appreciate that this certainly won’t appeal to everyone. One thoroughly ‘pissed off’ Goodreads user (their words, not mine!) stated gruffly that ‘good books don’t do that.’ (say that to Saramago’s Nobel Prize in Literature!) The narrator of Blindness gives a transparent account of events, without trying to mitigate any horrors. The narrative voice also maintains an emotional distance meaning that no judgement is passed on any occurrences. This gives Saramago’s writing a disarming directness. The narrative perspective does occasionally shift which can be a bit confusing, although this may have happened when the book was translated from Portuguese to English. Moreover, at times, it can be slightly unclear who is speaking and to whom. However, for the most part, it works well having integrated dialogue. Saramago never refers to characters by name. Instead, the main characters are given unique appellations, such as ‘the car thief,’ ‘the man with the gun,’ ‘the first blind man’ (many of which contain ironic references to seeing e.g. ‘the old man with the black eye patch,’ ‘the girl with the dark glasses,’ and ‘the boy with the squint’). This means that readers rely largely on dialogue to form opinions of the protagonists – very fitting for a book about being deprived of the sense we rely on most: sight.
The doctor’s wife is the only character throughout the novel who does not lose her vision, which is never explained. Unwilling to leave her husband, she feigns blindness to ensure she is interned with him. This is crucial, for she is often the reader’s eyes and her ability to see ensures that the other protagonists gravitate towards her, thus holding the plot together. However, she can be quite a frustrating protagonist for various reasons. Her general passivity is rather irritating. For example, she is really slow to realise how she could use the pair of scissors which she forgot to turn over to the armed gang to her advantage. Moreover, when the doctor has sex with ‘the girl with the dark glasses,’ her indifference to this is baffling. She allegedly feels no jealousy whatsoever and says she actually feels sorry for them. I get why she would pity them given the circumstances. However, the fact that she feels no pain or anger after being cheated on aggravated me and didn’t feel believable. She simply moves on like nothing happened. Also, how did the doctor expect to get away with his infidelity?! He is well aware that his wife can still see and the beds in the ward are mere meters apart.
This leads me on to another complaint. How are the majority of the other internees oblivious to the fact that the doctor’s wife can still see?! She’s pretty poor at maintaining the pretence of being blind, for she frequently says things that give herself away. When she eventually reveals to the others that she isn’t actually blind, some say they had their suspicions. Nonetheless, the fact that nobody questioned or confronted her directly prior to this felt improbable. My final gripe is that after the protagonists escape from the burnt down asylum, a lot of the dialogue consists of trite aphorisms and proverbs which gets a bit grating to read (as well as feeling unrealistic).
Rant over. Although this book is evidently shaded with allegorical meaning, I like that Saramago isn’t too heavy-handed, leaving a lot open to interpretation. However, the book’s epigraph, an excerpt from the Book of Exhortations (‘If you can see, look. If you can look, observe’) gestures towards what he is attempting to convey through this novel. Another pertinent moment comes at the end of the novel when one of the characters (it isn’t clear who) offers their hypothesis on blindness: ‘I don’t think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see.’
Blindness stands as a powerful reminder that we shouldn’t take things for granted and that there is still hope even in the face of great adversity – an apt message for contemporary readers. I would rate this book 4 out of 5 stars.
(All photos are taken from the 2008 film adaptation starring Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo which is meant to be good and less graphic than the book)
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