Book author: José Saramago

The Cave is a novel of many stories. It is the story of an ageing man, Cipriano Algor, finding new love even as his livelihood is threatened. It is a story about families and the development of intimate human relationships. It is the story of the pioneer, seeking a new life away from what once was home. It is the story of technology against tradition, power against the individual, capitalist totalitarianism and revolution. It is a story where the true philosophers are found in all classes and seem more likely to evolve in those whose brains are still active in their fingers, working with the very substance from which we derive; in this case potters and clay. And the list could go on.  Offering a review of the novel would therefore much deplete the ground Saramago tries to cover.

Whilst the unfolding of the characters lives is rendered beautifully, carefully expressing the multiple ways in which people in close relationships communicate through even the most simple of phrases, there is a veiled fear of technology that muddies the waters of Saramago’s ultimate argument in which the cave is shown to be the creation of the Centre who use consumerism to lure more and more citizens under their carefully veiled totalitarian rule. His argument is appealing. The further humans are drawn into the world of advertisements, of wanting for wanting’s sake, of security from the natural world, of simulated experience, the further they are from interacting with the real or natural world and the more they rely upon that simulated world. My only issue is with the terms natural and artificial. Whilst the power dynamics of Saramago’s Centre remain true to comparable corporations in real life, not all ‘artificial’ developments can necessarily be considered bad. I mean, where would we stop? Is Saramago suggesting that anything that doesn’t involve hard physical labour is potentially threatening? I don’t think so, but perhaps there will be a time when a break with modern developments is required. Perhaps consumerism has already bound us to a life in which we stare at a wall of shadows.

That of course is the heart of the novel: Plato’s cave. Deep within the walls of the growing Centre the truth of the prison they are building and developing day by day is uncovered. But when dangerous secrets are redefined as propaganda, the truth is something only a few can see.

In some ways the denouement of The Cave happens rather quickly. How Cipriano Algor’s family gets to the Centre has more page weight than any potential escape. However, the build up to the Centre allows for the development of all the other narratives about creation, love, and the delicate nature of what it means to be a human being. The story of Found, the dog Cipriano finds sleeping in the old kennel in the yard, is central to an exploration of being. Found’s instinct and thought form a huge part of what it is to be human, a bestial nobility that stands in the face of the Centre and its no pet rule, that offers a notion of man as part of the whole of nature, not something that stands outside it.

Ultimately, The Cave is a beautiful and complex novel that pokes holes in our unconscious acceptance of modern life. I thoroughly recommend it.

Next week I’ll be reading The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth, followed by Orfeo by Richard Powers.

I can’t help it, I really enjoy reading Saramago and his translator, Margaret Jull Costa. Whilst there are books of his I haven’t enjoyed – I’m thinking of The Double – I was looking forward to reading Cain and I wasn’t disappointed. I like the lack of capitalization for proper nouns. I like the lack of punctuation for speech, indeed the lack of paragraphing for speech because despite all of that, you know who is speaking and you also know you are being asked to question the veracity of the speech being written down by an author who didn’t even hear the speech to begin with. So, reading Saramago is a pleasure and the words flow with a compelling retelling of an old story.

Cain is a new version of the Old Testament, one in which Cain challenges God’s interaction with humanity. After killing his brother, something Cain gets God to admit he is partly responsible for, Cain wanders through some of the salient points of the Old Testament (the destruction of the tower of Babel, the near sacrifice of Isaac, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Job’s trials, the battle of Jericho and so on) witnessing the limits of God’s power and compassion. Eventually Cain challenges God’s will by destroying all life on board the arch leaving God with no new humanity to repopulate the earth, only Cain, whom he has decreed he will not kill. So Cain ends his days arguing with the lord. He says no one will miss the human race. Even the angels, described in every instance as compassionate, have explained that to their mind human beings do not deserve the life God gave them – and by that they mean the freedoms of life outside of heaven. Heaven is as boring as life in the Garden of Eden. But the life the angels covet comes with a price for God, his creations will not always comply with his wishes. God is the foreman in creation and Cain is keen to remind him that there is a greater force than God at work in the universe, perhaps the very force that had Cain wander through time to follow how God manages his human creations.

At first, I was disappointed in the ending of the book because I wasn’t ready for the end of humanity, or the story to end, but perhaps that is Saramago’s point. Really we are a plague upon the earth, polluting and endangering the world and ourselves. Who would miss us? And how could any God, allowing us to live in this way, be more loving, more just, less blood-thirsty than us? When does a parent step in? Usually before serious harm comes from a child’s actions. Perhaps an ongoing debate between God and his creation, between Cain and God, as happens at the end of the novel, is all God could really have hoped for? This God at least?

Cain is a pleasurable way to remind ourselves of the foundations of our culture, of the angry God of the Old Testament who still seems to rule the way we live today. The stories of the Old Testament are so rich, and Cain does them justice, unwinding the threads of civilization with humour and beauty.

Next week I’ll be reading and reviewing The Human Script by Johnny Rich. Then the reading list is as follows: Intuition by Allegra Goodman, Love Life by Zeruya Shalev, The Last World by Christoph Ransmayr.