Jose Saramago: The Cave

By GORDON McLAUCHLAN

Like most of the modern European novels I've been reading lately, The Cave is in the tradition of meticulous realism, with the narrative depicting almost every thought and gesture of its central character's life. But lurking behind these simple plots are allegorical themes that carry subtle commentaries on modern life, its manners and mores.

For some reason I'm not sure of, New Zealand readers are not as fully exposed to the work of contemporary writers in other major languages as are Americans and, particularly, the British.

The art of translating fictional works has made great progress in recent years and has brought to readers in English a trove of powerful literary novels and poetry. The translator of The Cave is Margaret Jull Costa whose earlier work on Jose Saramago's All the Names won her Britain's premier prize for translation.

Saramago, a Portuguese, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998 and has a gathering reputation outside his home region.

The Cave homes in on the lives of three people: foremost, an elderly potter, Cipriano Algor, then his daughter and assistant, Marta, and her husband, Marcal Gacho. Their village pottery supplies a large shopping mall and apartment complex, ominously called The Centre, at the heart of a nearby city. Marcal works there as a security guard and is awaiting an appointment as live-in guard in order that the three can move into an apartment within the compound.

Suddenly, The Centre's head buyer says that not only do they not want to buy his work any more but Algor must take away the large quantity of his work they've been unable to sell. Algor and his daughter put up a proposition for a new line of product which is accepted at first and then, suddenly, stopped.

The story is set against the increasing sprawl and disorder of modern cities and the corresponding rise of the corporation with its pervasive Big Brother techniques to keep economic outsiders at bay. Those who don't accept the rigorous control of the organisation with its heartless, labyrinthine administrative processes are rejected and forced to seek their fortune elsewhere as outsiders. What Cipriano and Marcal find near the end, in a cave beneath The Centre, is for the reader to discern. It is enough to say the discovery frightens them into flight.

The Cave is a densely told story, packed with the minutiae of Cipriano's life in a way that enables readers to know and understand with extraordinary intimacy the characters, their motives and the impulses that drive them. It is a formidable read that requires careful attention. Saramago does not use quotes to depict direct speech, just capital letters in a narrative that surges along. Sentences are comma-ed off rather than broken up with full stops, and the paragraph breaks are few. All of which means it's a much bigger book than the page numbers would suggest. The narration also switches from time to time from the first person to the all-seeing story teller.

What is important is that the reader should get the hang of the narrative style and technique as quickly as possible and take up the gait of the prose, which is fluent and fast. The rewards for staying with this story are many. Saramago paints his pictures with the precision and detail of a pointillist, and his eye for both the callousness of disembodied organisations and the need for human beings to be responsible to one another is clear and unflinching. The narrative abounds in simple truths and exposes how ordinary people can have their triumphs and preserve their dignity through the support that love brings them.

Harvill Press

$36.95

* Gordon McLauchlan is a Herald columnist.