Book: Seeing by Jose Saramago

On a wet day in Portugal officials wait as an election takes place. When the votes are counted 80% of them are found to be blank. The confused government decides to re-run the election a week later imploring voters to cast a meaningful vote, but the result is the same and the government steadily enforces a martial law on where is starts to fear is a terrorist plot.

Seeing picks up four years after Blindness, an earlier work by Saramago based around the idea of a plague of white blindness. Both books have a gripping central theme that allows many analogies with the political state of the modern world, but both struggle to draw the reader in. Seeing is especially problematic in it's absence of paragraphs and quotation marks, requiring a high level of concentration and focus from the reader that distances them from the narrative.

Whilst Saramago clearly has a knack for great ideas, he may need to refresh his mind on some of the more basic ideas of the novel.