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In an unnamed city, a man waiting in traffic suddenly and inexplicably goes blind. The doctor treating him also goes blind. Soon the contagion spreads until all known victims of this mysterious 'white blindness' are herded into an asylum, where they are brutalised by a gang of armed blindmen. Only the doctor's wife - pretending to be blind - is immune from the condition. Fire engulfs the building, and a gang of blind inmates - led by the doctor's wife - escape to a ravaged city. After a few days, the plague of blindness is inexplicably lifted. And that's about it, really. Three unexplained phenomena govern this novel: the plague of blindness; the immunity of one character; the spontaneous and self-propagating cure. Therefore it is impossible for the author to escape the accusation that he has some explaining to do. But Saramago has a wonderful trapdoor through which he can flee. That trapdoor can be summed up in one word: "Art". And that word includes the inverted commas. Often when a novel is described as a 'failure' it means that the author tried something that might have succeeded but just couldn't make it work for him. "Blindness", on the other hand, is an excellent idea that could easily have been made to work in so many ways but here the author did not even try. Worse, he ran away from trying. Saramago plainly wanted to attain the literary merit of having erected some great and mysterious allegory, and he was prepared to ruthlessly simplify in order to do so. Worse, the critical community (and no small part of the reading public) have gone along with this con-trick. The prose is a grab-bag of gimmicks intended the make the novel "different" and thus mask its artistic nudity. Thus we find whole paragraphs that go on for three pages, interminable sentences within which three or four people are speaking at once; the exclusive use of commas for punctuation; and polysyndetic pile-ups such as the following: "... all the images in the church had their eyes covered, statues with a white cloth tied around the head, paintings with a thick brushstroke of white paint, and there was a woman teaching her daughter how to read, and both had their eyes covered, and a man with an open book on which a little child was sitting, and both had their eyes covered, and another man, his body spiked with arrows, and he had his eyes covered, and a woman with a lit lamp, and she had her eyes covered, and a man with wounds on his hands and feet and his chest, and he had his eyes covered, and another man with a lion, and both had their eyes covered, and another man with a lamb, and both had their eyes covered, and another man with an eagle, and both had their eyes covered, and another man with a spear standing over a fallen man with horns and cloven feet, and both had their eyes covered, and another man carrying a set of scales, and he had his eyes covered, and an old bald man holding a white lily, and he had his eyes covered, and another old man leaning on an unsheathed sword, and he had his eyes covered ..." [p. 300, Vintage] There's more, of course, but I'll stop there. It's just cruel to quote at length from an author who writes like this. However, if one merely notes that the above passage is not even a sentence, but an *extract* from a sentence, one appreciates what a dreary task is facing the reader who sets out to finish this book. Of course, a universal plague of blindness has an effect on "society". How could it not? Thus much of the commentary on this novel has consisted of predictable claptrap about the "fragility of society", the "human condition" etc. But what are we left with, in reality? "Blindness" seems to be little more that a great, inflated and unexplained metaphor - cavernous in its emptiness, and wholly unsatisfying to think about. Saramago has started with a tabula rasa, and rather than inscribing well-thought-out ideas upon it, merely left to bad readers the job of projecting profundity onto its very blankness. Saramago is apparently a Nobel laureate, so I kept fossicking about in the text for merit. At one point I thought that perhaps the multi-comma'ed prose style - wherein it's not clear who is speaking at any one moment - might be a clever device intended to remove a layer of perception from the reader, and thus place them in the same situation as the blind characters. But then in a bookshop one day I found myself reading Saramago's "The Double", which features exactly the same prose device even though the book has nothing to do with blindness. In short, it was just shtick. So in summary, it seems that a great idea occurred to a man who had neither the talent nor inclination to develop it. Reading someone with Saramago's lack of commitment tapping this conceit was like watching a man try to unleash the resources of a gold mine with a wooden spoon. Saramago plainly realised that to inflate his delicate plot with awkward details would be to expose the balloon to popping. Since he could not make the story flowing from the idea interesting, or even readable, he acted like the literary equivalent of a squid shooting a cloud of ink: there was a blast of "Art", followed immediately by a retreat into the opacity thereby obtained.