What's clear is that they're the same people, it's the same city, a few years later: one book illuminates the other in ways I can only begin to glimpse. It would be rash to 'explain' what all the people (but one) in the first book were blind to, or what it is that the citizens of Seeing see. Very evidently Saramago's novels are not simple parables. Seeing is all about them: the perverters of reason, the universal liars.

But the truly powerful of our world don't even appear in Blindness. The group of men who seize power in an asylum and use and abuse the weaker inmates have indeed abandoned self-respect and human decency: they are a microcosm of the corruption of power. Some behave with stupid, selfish brutality, sauve qui peut. This, on the face of it, is an odd description of Blindness, for in that book it is powerless people who insult human dignity – ordinary people, terrified at finding themselves and everyone else blind, everything out of control. So at last I could read his great book – or his greatest until its sequel.Īccepting his Nobel prize, Saramago, calling himself 'the apprentice', said: 'The apprentice thought, 'we are blind', and he sat down and wrote Blindness to remind those who might read it that we pervert reason when we humiliate life, that human dignity is insulted every day by the powerful of our world, that the universal lie has replaced the plural truths, that man stopped respecting himself when he lost the respect due to his fellow-creatures.' Here indeed was a novelist worthy of a reader's trust. It's hard not to gallop through prose that uses commas instead of full stops, but once I learned to slow down, the rewards piled up: his sound, sweet humour, his startling imagination, his admirable dogs and lovers, the subtle, honest workings of his mind. So I went back to the earlier novels and put myself through a course of Saramago. Before I'd let an author of such evident power give me the horrors, he'd have to earn my trust. Later I tried again, went further, and quit because I was scared. Faced with pages of run-on sentences and unparagraphed dialogue without quotation marks, I soon quit, snarling about literary affectations.

Some years ago a reliable friend told me I should read José Saramago's Blindness.

Seeing saramago