Jose Saramago: The Double

Reviewed by GORDON McLAUCHLAN

I have acquired a taste for the Nobel Prize-winning author Jose Saramago, and anyone who wants to read his stories needs to do that to cope with his eccentricities of format and style. The flow of the prose and the depth of the insights make it generally worthwhile to stay with his narrative but, alas, in The Double, the author parodies himself.

Saramago writes at stream of consciousness pace with no chapters in some novels, few paragraph breaks, no quotation break-outs, and with sentences mostly comma-ed off. An example:

The idea of the letter came up in the conversation, Yes, but youre not expecting me to believe that you had the idea while we were talking, No, I had thought about it vaguely before, Vaguely, Yes, vaguely, Listen Maximo, Yes, my love, Go ahead and write the letter, Thanks so much for saying yes.

Believe it or not, once you get used to it, you are dragged along with astonishing speed and even when the content rebuffs your interest, as it does in the long central passages of The Double, the style somehow keeps you going.

As with earlier novels like The Cave, All the Names and The Gospel According To Jesus Christ, the style is rivetingly successful. Readers surf along on the words, buoyed by ideas, enlightening self-analysis and wonderful characterisation, but The Double doesn't have the same substance, or a large enough cast of characters.

Like all of Saramago's stories it is strongly allegorical, this time about the fragility of identity. A history teacher, Tertuliano Maximo Afonso, watches a video and in it he sees an actor who looks and sounds exactly like him. Close scrutiny of a series of films reveals the actor even has moles in the same place, and the same accident scar on his knee. Afonso become obsessed with the need to meet the actor. He does and the entanglement that follows has the elements of a thriller, as the double's wife and Afonso's girlfriend are pulled, fatally, into the drama.

So The Double has a brilliant start, but readers' stamina is unnecessarily tested before the story comes to a compelling final section. If you start with The Double you may well be put off one of the finest novelists of our time. Far better to try All the Names or The Cave first.

* Gordon McLauchlan is a Herald columnist