Blindness

"It’s a novel about a city, and ultimately a country, being struck by an entirely unexplained plague of blindness, which rapidly transforms this civilized society into anarchy. I chose it because it brings up the question of what conditions are necessary for sanity and what happens when you take those conditions away, and also the idea that mental or physical wellbeing are really quite narrow states. They depend on all things being equal: things like having enough resources, having physical ability and a basic sense of justice and shared logic and so on, and Blindness highlights how close any of us are from becoming mentally unwell and unstable without those. The epidemic appears from nowhere, and the state locks the afflicted people away into a mental asylum to try to control it. They don’t give them food, but they have access to medicine. But they can’t control the epidemic, and soon everybody is affected and all hell breaks loose. The people become like animals – they kill each other to get food and by the end of it there are corpses lying all over the streets. It’s obviously a sort of allegory and a kind of literary sci-fi. I don’t think he’s trying to be subtle at all. It’s very disturbing, very powerful writing; Saramago’s a brilliant writer. It’s beautifully challenging: he doesn’t use punctuation, except for full stops, and he doesn’t use speech marks. None of the characters have names, they’re just given titles like “the Doctor”, or “the Doctor’s wife” and their speech just runs together. It’s usually quite clear who’s speaking, but it’s muffled: like everyone’s just surfacing from water. Exactly: there’s very little about what people look like, obviously, because everyone’s blind, so you feel you’re sort of lost in this world as well. In Blindness it’s just one physical defect that renders all of civilization completely useless, and disordered, and inhumane."