Seeing by Jose Saramago

In his 1995 novel, Blindness, José Saramago depicts a mysterious epidemic of sightlessness in a large, unidentified city, and the unraveling of society and government that follows. Much of the action follows the wife of an ophthalmologist who is solely exempted from the affliction, and the struggles of her and the small band of folks she is able to protect from the chaos that ensues. In 2004, Saramago published a sequel of sorts to his acclaimed novel. Set in the same city, Seeing opens four years after the epidemic, which remains a forbidden topic of discussion. The story begins with a parliamentary election, in which a morning of terrible weather threatens turnout:

However long the presiding officer and his colleagues took to scrutinize documents, a queue never formed, there were, at most, at any one time, three or four people waiting, and three or four people, try as they might, can never make a queue worthy of the name. I was quite right, commented the representative of the p.i.t.m. [part of the middle], the abstention rate will be enormous, massive, there'll be no possible agreement on the result after this, the only solution will be to hold the elections again...

The representative was correct, but not for the reason he stated. As so often happens in Saramago's novels, there is a sudden and curious turn of events:

[A]t four o'clock in the afternoon, an hour which is neither late nor early, neither fish nor fowl, those voters who had, until then, remained in the quiet of their homes, apparently blithely ignoring the election altogether, started to come out onto the streets...and all of them, absolutely all of them, the healthy and inform, the former on foot, the latter in wheelchairs, on stretchers, in ambulances, headed straight for their respective polling stations like rivers which know no other course than that which flows to the sea.

Even more remarkable than the abrupt outpouring of voters is the outcome of their votes:

It was gone midnight when the counting finished. The number of valid votes did not quite reach twenty-five percent, with the party on the right winning thirteen percent, the party in the middle nine percent and the party on the left two and a half percent. There were very few spoiled ballots and very few abstentions. All the others, more than seventy percent of the total votes cast, were blank.

This mass casting of blank votes is viewed by the reigning government (led by the Party of the Right) as spurious, despite the fact that casting a blank vote is a legitimate option under the country's elections laws. Several days later a re-vote is held, and the percentage of blank votes cast is even higher: 83%. The government, again, views the results as invalid.

The remainder of the book is basically divided into two parts. The first follows the machinations of the president, prime minister, and cabinet officers as they scheme to respond to what they view as a veritable rebellion by the voters, ultimately moving the government out of the capital and effectively sealing off the city with a military siege. With few exceptions, they display an utter distaste for the people they have been chosen to govern. Their motivating assumption is that the cause of the trouble is some conspiracy or defect in the people rather than the government, a none too subtle expression of Saramago's views regarding ruling elites. It is a particularly potent message considering recent events in Iran.

The focus shifts midway through as the government sends a small police team into the city to investigate a curious letter they received from a citizen, claiming that there was a woman who did not go blind during the epidemic four years before. Otherwise without any leads as to the cause of the current political crisis, the interior minister gains approval to interview the letter writer and explore his claims. A police superintendent leads the three-person team into the besieged capital. The woman, of course, is the protagonist from Blindness, now a suspect because her immunity to blindness is as inexplicable to the government officials as the mass casting of blank votes. They presume there must be some connection between these unknowns. The unknown, after all, is the most dangerous thing to an incumbent government elected based on the old, usual patterns of behavior.

While displaying Saramago's usual talent for prose, Seeing lacks a good deal of the bite of its sightless predecessor. The commentary on government and society is a bit obvious, and the cabinet officials and the meetings they hold sometimes descend into caricature, a danger implicit in allegory but avoided by Saramago at his best. And while plot is never the point with Saramago, the story told in Seeing lacks the drama and the tension that made Blindness such a well-rounded work of fiction, and the ending may disappoint those who've made it through both books.