The Stone Raft by José Saramago
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Brexit Forefelt

Spain and Portugal float away from Europe as a disunited kingdom, leaving Gibraltar behind, a lonely Atlantic island. Written in 1986 about the Iberian leave-taking from continental Europe, The Stone Raft is the perfect book for Brexit 2016. A cliché, I know, but not an un-useful one.


Separation from the rest of Europe is just not easy emotionally for either party. "A loving mother, Europe was saddened by the misfortune of her lands on the extreme west." All sorts of connections - journalistic as well as legal and physical (particularly electricity) - have to be worked out, as any country with experience would know. And, with Saramago, Portugal has that experience and can share it with Britain.

Apologies by those departing are of course necessary, along the lines of 'it's not anything about you, it's us'. So in their letters home, the inveterate exiteers write "...that their world had changed, and their way of life, they were not to blame, on the whole they were people with little willpower, the sort of people who could not make up their mind..." No fault international divorce.

Even in translation one has often to voice Saramago's prose in order to get the sense of it much less enjoy its full effects. It is a form of written/oral story-telling that has an essential musicality which is as much a part of the tale as its subtle humour and irony. It is also lots of fun. The characters and cadence could be from The Canterbury Tales:

"So let is not ask Jose Anaico who he is and what he does for a living, where he comes from and where he is going, whatever we find out about him, we shall only find out from him, and this description, this sketchy information will also have to serve for Joana Carda and her elm branch, for Joaquim Sassa and the stone he threw into the sea, for Pedro Orce and the chair he got up from, life does not begin when people are born, if it were so, each day would be a day gained, life begins much later, and how often too late, not to mention those lives that have no sooner begun than they are over, which has led one Piet to exclaim, Ah, who will write the history of what might have been."


I am particularly fond of Saramago's alternative Cartesianism: "...the only great truth is that the world cannot die." Quem mundus non potest mori, perhaps, as a replacement for the Cogito ergo sum. Not that it has the same epistemological pretensions as the Cogito, of course, but " ...in the absence of any certainties one has to pretend." Indeed, pretending to leave the EU may be Britain's salvation as well.

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