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We don't really do political fiction in Britain. We do satire and lampoon very well, in the form of Private Eye and the short dramatic sketch. But stark, extended, allegorical fiction reminiscent of Kafka, Sartre, Grass or Calvino has no sustained tradition in our literature. It bears testimony to the relative stability of our ideological affairs, something which friends across the channel, assailed by waves of fascism and communism, cannot claim to have shared.
And so, the translation into English of a surreal, political novel such as Seeing (Harvill Secker, £11.99) by the Portuguese Nobel Prize laureate Jose Saramago is a major event, a door to another world of storytelling.
Saramago, 83, has made many enemies over the years: some infuriated by his communist sympathies; others outraged by his attacks on Israel. ("What is
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Jose Saramago’s terrifying political novel arrives in English at last, says tim auld
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happening [in Ramallah] is a crime that may be compared to Auschwitz," he has said.) But there's nothing polemical or preachy about Seeing.
It's a cool, terrifying presentation of the catastrophic collapse of democracy. In the anonymous capital of an anonymous country, municipal elections are under way. Or not, as it turns out, because 83 per cent of the electorate cast blank votes: disillusion or an act of collective terrorism? The government declares a state of emergency and devises a plan to discredit its citizens. It all sounds rather heavy going, but it's not. There's a beautifully Clouseau-esque police investigation, which manages to be both farcical and touching, and the lightness of Saramago's touch only serves to highlight the bleak violence of the conclusion. May British politics long remain undeserving of such a dark, prophetic chronicler. 
FIRST
POSTED MAY 9, 2006
Island of Lost Souls by Martyn Bedford
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