I just couldn't say why - at least, not in any coherent way. After finishing Till We Have Faces, I knew it was something special. Dissatisfied, because it is also elusive. Satisfied, because Blindness is a moving and impeccably written odyssey. Like Lewis, Saramago pulls off the rare feat of leaving the reader satisfied and dissatisfied at the same time. If this be all that stands between us and our baser inclinations, what then? What, to borrow Harvey's line in The Dark Knight, does it mean to be decent men in an indecent time? Being civilized has no meaning, after all, when civilization has ceased to exist. Like McCarthy, he paints a devastating picture of man cut loose from the feeble restraints of the civilized world. Like McCarthy, Saramago offers little explanation regarding the origin of the cataclysm he's less concerned with cause than with effect. If characters here tread carefully lest they lose their way, so must we.īlindness is its own beast, but in reading it I was reminded of two others: McCarthy's The Road, which I have read every year for the last four years and Lewis' Till We Have Faces, which I recently read for the very first time. This takes some getting used to, but it is a fitting and even brilliant stylistic decision that reenforces the tragedy of Saramago's world. Saramago traces the aftermath through the groping fingers of a band of nameless refugees, known to us only by various descriptors: the doctor, the man with eye patch, the car thief, and so on. When humanity is stricken with an incurable plague of white blindness, there is no decline of civilization - only a swift and dreadful fall.
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