In José Saramago’s novels things are slippery. Sentences extend, with little to stop them from mutating into whole paragraphs, and the words themselves are untrustworthy (“they change their minds just as people do”). Reality shifts and slides: peninsulas break off from Europe and float away across the Atlantic; entire nations lose their sight and then, in a later novel, gain it back again. The Nobel Laureate deals with human problems by turning them round in a fantastical light. Here he is on familiar (and sparkling) ground once more, in a work that meditates on what is perhaps the greatest challenge that mankind faces.

Cover of Death at Intervals by José SaramagoAs in many of his books, we are in an unnamed country. The first line is, as first lines go, a corker: “The following day, noone died.” Having deprived his imaginary citizens, at one time or another, of most bodily functions, Saramago here denies them the ultimate release of death. Those who are about to die, who should die, instead exist in a permanent half-life, causing untold problems to the citizenship.

Saramago is exact and excellent in depicting the flurries of activity and counteractivity into which the bureaucrats, citizens and maphia (so called to distance themselves from the “mafia”) throw themselves. The long shadow of thanatos has been withdrawn, and the church gets upset: “without death there is no resurrection, and without resurrection there is no church.” The undertakers get upset too, and start burying pets; it is only the insurance companies who truly prosper in this strange new state – when people start asking for their life insurance policies back, they cleverly say that eighty will count as a legal death.

Saramago delights in the complexities of administrative wrangles: every move has a counter-move, every step forward is a step back. When it is discovered that people in other countries are still dying, families start taking their nearly-dead across the borders, whereupon they die immediately: does this count as murder? If it does, which country can prosecute? Should the government condone this, when it is well known that the maphia is helping to cart the nearly-dead across? A war is nearly begun, but, as Saramago wryly notes, “even if there was a military coup, at least we can be sure of one thing, however many shots they fire at each other, they won’t succeed in killing anyone.”

The novel takes a different tack half way through, just as it seems that stasis has been reached. A letter from death (uncapitalised) arrives on the desk of the director-general of the television station, announcing that “death took death away to show humans what eternity was like; the experiment failed”. Saramago here plays an unexpected and very funny joke. The letter from death is printed by a newspaper, having been sub-edited out of all recognition, as it is written with “the absence of full stops, the complete lack of very necessary parentheses, the obsessive elimination of paragraphs, the random use of commas and, most unforgivable sin of all, the intentional and almost diabolical abolition of the capital letter.”

This of course is exactly how Saramago writes. In the novel, death takes exception and threatens to kill the sub-editor; one wonders if Saramago is fulfilling some long-hidden fantasy.

The one failing in the novel is death herself (for it is a she). Of course it is incredibly hard to characterise an abstract notion, even in a fantasy novel, and for this reason I kept thinking of Terry Pratchett’s skeletal DEATH with his capitalised speech, horror of eternity, filing cabinet full of every person’s details and yearning to be human. death (uncapitalised) in Saramago is skeletal and, er, yearns to be human, and also hates being alone for eternity (and also has a filing cabinet that contains the details of everybody ever alive). And death too, just as Pratchett’s DEATH does, learns to be human, for eventually she comes up against a cellist who refuses to die when expected, and so she herself begins to follow him, to watch him and eventually to love him.

The book is an extended riff, a joyous, burbling, warm satire on human frailty, shot through with veins of dark humour, and despite the fact that the latter half fails to convince as much as the riotous first half, is a thing of wonder and beauty, delighting in the instability of language and human (and inhuman) nature.

Death at Intervals is published by Harvill Secker