I first heard about this novel from the movie by Fernando Mierles whom I have liked his work in Cidade de Deus (City of God). The movie was screened in Cannes 2008 and received very bad reviews from critics, so I thought about reading the book myself. It turned out that the book is by a Nobel Laurette called Jose Saramango.
A few pages into the novel and you realize that you are going to read something deep. At least that's what I felt. I am sorry but this discussion will contain spoilers, major spoilers, I assure you. So read if you are not interested in the novel or the movie or simply have read it before.
The novel follows the story of a group of people who lived in an unnamed city that had an epidemic of blindness. White blindness that is. The disease was highly infectious, so the government quarantined those who were infected or exposed to infection in an old mental asylum and surrounded it by army troops. The story takes place during the quarantine and *spoiler* after the destruction of the asylum and the escape of all the inmates. Among the people in the asylum was a woman who could see. She was the wife of an ophthalmologist who lost his sight, but she lied about her condition so that she could accompany him.
The novel is incredible in its strength and scope. I have never read anything that was remotely similar. But the last part of the novel felt as if I was reading a novelization of a zombie movie, like 28 Days Later or one of the Dead series of movies by George Romero. I didn't like this. Perhaps what I hated most in this novel is the cruelty of the writer. When people were thrown into the quarantine, the condition of their life was very harsh. There was no water, no lavatories, the food wasn't enough, everything was dirty and rotten. The soldiers guarding the infected were very easy going with the triggers of their rifles and a lot of the blind were shot by the guards who feared that they might get close and infect them. The blind were issued some rules that were repeated over loud speakers daily. Among the rules was that no external help will be provided to them, this includes medical help and medications. Also, if violence erupts inside the asylum, no one will interfere.
Most of the description we received was through the eyes of the doctor's wife. I forgot to say that there are no names in the novel. Not a single name. People are referred to with adjectives; like the doctor's wife, the man with the eye batch, the first blind man, the wife of the first blind man, the car thief, etc, etc. I thought it was weird at the beginning but it fit the mood, as, like I said, we saw things through the eyes of the seeing doctor's wife. And I think this is the way she identified all the people. According to a feature in them.
This is a dark and violent trip into the heart of humanity. The people degenerated into savagery and barbarism. With no one watching, they started to fight over the food, urinate and defecate everywhere, refuse to bury the dead who died in clashes with the soldiers. When the situation became worse and more and more people started going blind, the government threw into the asylum more and more numbers that the wards can fit. In total, there was about 250 blind persons in the asylum, that's when trouble happened, and this is where the novel lost me...
A group of thugs started to take all the food and require payment from all the other inmates to receive their food. When this happened, I thought "This will boil down to sex." Because in a community like this, money, gold and other riches simply have no value. The only things that will be valuable are medicine, food and services. And the writer didn't let me down, and this is where the novel turned barbaric. The thugs started asking for women, or no one will eat. People refused at first, then they succumbed and agreed. There was 6 wards in the asylum. The thugs occupied one, so that left five. They will start with each ward's women and then rotate. According to the doctor's wife who made a small expedition into the thugs ward, there was twenty of them.
I don't know how can people agree to this, even if it meant their death. To allow women to be raped so that the whole of the quarantined people can eat is an inhuman idea. How can any one accept this? Also the married people, including the doctor's wife, who could see!!!, did what was asked from them. This is just insane. The thugs had a single gun with them, and they were twenty, this leaves about 230 or so of the other inmates. Can't they storm the ward and kill the other thugs. Yes, there will be casualties, but compare this with the greater benefit and you can see the winning formula. Besides, a gun won't last forever, and the one who was firing it was blind for God's sake!!! But no, no one thought of that, and I, as a reader, had to endure scenes of brutal raping of women who couldn't see, by men who also couldn't see. This part of the novel shocked me like nothing I have ever read or seen in my life. When I was reading it, I was speechless and my face flushed and my heart started racing. It was brutal, really brutal. That's why I will NEVER recommend this book to anyone.
Then there was an uprising in the asylum (but when it was too late, why didn't it happen sooner than this?) and everything was destroyed.
Those who managed to escape were then shocked when they knew that the whole country was struck by the disease. Everyone was blind, and everything fell into anarchy. There was no law anymore, no police, no food, no running water, no electricity. People lived together in ground floors and in shops in groups and they went forging for food, in groups. They urinated and defecated everywhere in groups, and they died in groups. Dogs and cats started eating the corpses, the air was filled with the pungent odour of death and decay. It was the apocalypse. That's why I referred to this part as a zombie movie.
But all of this is nothing compared to the ending. This really blew things for me. People started seeing again... It's not clear if the infection was worldwide or not, but I think that that it was worldwide. If the whole world was living as it was described in the novel, then to start seeing again is simply a disaster. Can you imagine how can there be a leadership again? It will take people centuries to return back to what they were. It reminded me of the short story The Poison Belt by Sherlock Holmes creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. And if you think about it, I think some people started practicing cannibalism in some regions, but this is a speculation from my part.
You might think that I hated the novel. I really don't know what to think. The novel was very well written, with meticulous attention to details. But what bothered me was the cruelty. There is way too much cruelty in here, for no reason. We could have just fast forwarded from the point of the appearance of the thugs to the destruction of the asylum, without having to endure all the pain and misery.
Also, religion is almost totally neglected in this novel. Whenever people face problems, they tend to be religious and start believing in the presence of a Higher Force and start praying, each according to his/her belief. If this happens in day to day activities, why won't it happen at the end of the world. The religious themes have to be taken carefully into consideration. But its absence here didn't shock me as its absence in On the Beach.
The writer didn't specify a certain country or a certain ethnic group, even the religious part at the end was also non specific. I think the writer wanted his novel to be universal. A universal account of a plague that could have caused the end of the world. I think the thugs were a symbol for non democratic governments: they just came and started taking all the wealth into their hands and abusing the resources for their own benefit. The blind in the quarantine are the helpless people that are governed by such regimes (but in my book, it doesn't relieve them from the responsibility of what happened in exchange for food). But what I fail to see its symbolism is the blindness itself. Is it a sign for the fall of false charade that people are keeping because everyone else is looking at them. I have read similar novels that dealt with this subject like Lord of the Flies and Deliverance. Or is it simply a sign of the fall of laws and rules, and that's what is keeping the savagery of man at bay? Or is it simply just a thing for the plot that has no deeper meaning? I think it's the first one. When you can't see what you do and people can't see what you are doing, then those without strong inner rules will simply lose it. Lose everything and degenerate back into animals, where survival is the most important and vital thing.
The woman who can see is the link between us and those living zombies. She is there so that we can identify them. Why she never lost her eye sight is not explained in the novel. Although she could see, yet it kept this matter a secret and endured everything that the other endured, from hunger to rape. Her husband is someone who fooled me. At the beginning of the novel I liked him. He was the sound of reason in the beginning of the quarantine, but then I saw that he was just full of air. He didn't stand for his wife to protect her from the sexual abuse, no even worse, when they were "preparing" for the abuse, he cheated on her when chance presented herself. I don't know how can he allow himself this after everything his wife did for him. She took care of him, cleaned him up from his own filth and gave him the higher position that he occupied in the ward where they lived.
Fernando is a great director. His work in Cidade of Deus and The Constant Gardener is a living proof for this, but the critical opinion for this movie was very low. Critics hated it and I understand why. I have no idea how he will portray some of the scenes in the novel, from the orgies to the streets full of excreta to the rendering of hundreds of people on screen who are acting like blind people. The movie was released in the US months ago, and was, as expected, a box office flop. The movie has a very strong cast with Juliane Moore doing the role of the doctor's wife. I know that it will be painful, but I am looking forward to seeing it.
UPDATE: I have seen the movie. Like the novel, I can't recommend it. Lots of the novel didn't make it into the movie, especially the city parts. I didn't get the huge scope and magnitude of the cataclysm as I did in the novel. In the novel it felt like the apocalypse. You felt desperate. I am not sure if it's humanly possible to film these things. And I am also not sure if not being faithful to the novel was a good or a bad thing, considering that I didn't really fall in love with the novel.
I hope you liked this article, dear reader, and I am sorry for the spoilers.
