Review
THE CAVE
by José Saramago
Harcourt, 320 pp.
In Blindness, the novel released at the time of his Nobel Prize win, José Saramago examined human nature by pushing one concept to an extreme: What would happen if everyone in the world suddenly went blind? The scenario he painted was brutal and darkly compelling, a gloomy but probably accurate reflection of human nature at the end of this last blood-soaked century.
In The Cave, Saramago doesn't push things quite so far. His opposing forces are the potter Cipriano Algor, a craftsman of a type that all but vanished some time ago, and The Center, a fully integrated city-in-a-mall of a type that has not quite yet come to be. When The Center, Algor's only customer, cancels its contract for his old-fashioned pottery, the old-fashioned potter is thrown into conflict with the mall-ification of the world.
There is just enough hope to sustain the reader through the book's slow unfolding. Saramago's deeply felt humanity, the wry observations of his characters and his playful undermining of narrative conventions all promise an even richer experience than the industrial scream of Blindness.
In the end it is both more and less – though mostly less – than promised. Plato's allegory of the cave is applied in an unexpected way and with surprising contemporary resonance, but as a result Saramago’s characters are revealed as puppets. Although this may be intentional, it feels like a cheat. Saramago has missed the trick of framing an old theme so that it hits us anew – we've heard what he has to say before in more vivid and stirring ways.
The Cave is a one-note song that could have been a great short story or novella. Instead, it's a sometimes affecting but often dull and ultimately unsuccessful novel – as carefully formed and as dead as potter's clay.
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