There are elusive truths which must be approached round three corners, but there is also such a thing as going all round the houses for no good reason. The difference between the spareness of the idea and the bulk of the finished book is made up by the contributions of an intrusive narrator. Even so, The Double seems more of an idea for a novella than a novel. Whether this means that he becomes more 'himself' is debatable - it's just that he forfeits the luxury of wavering. It's true that he takes the story in some unexpected directions, so that his history teacher becomes more decisive, more committed to his life in the shadow of the doppelganger. After all, Saramago, born in 1922, is of an age to have seen existentialism and absurdism come and go.

There's nothing particularly new in positing a logical world and then introducing an absurd element which leads to an unravelling of identity. Saramago has no interest in providing an explanation for this freakish occurrence, only in exploring its repercussions. The two men's voices coincide even such things as moles and scars are identically distributed. The premise of The Double is simple, and announced in the title: a history teacher, idly watching the video of a romantic comedy, glimpses a supporting actor who proves to be identical to him in every way. From a single premise, he can generate prodigies of grounded fantasy. Saramago has a distinctive imagination, characterised not by leaps or flights but by a sublime grinding, as anyone who has read his implacable fable, Blindness, can confirm. You don't get to be a Nobel laureate simply by strewing obstacles in the path of your readers. Overall, the physical experience of reading The Double is of living in a house without windows.

Even when the conversations are simple, they take some disentangling: 'Forgive is just a word, Words are all we have, Where are you going now, Somewhere or other, to pick up the pieces and try and hide the scars.' The accelerated pace of speech within the prose format make the eye stumble. The reader hungers for the piquancy of a single inverted comma. Any visual relief that might be provided by dialogue is denied by the device of embedding it in the prose, with only a capital letter to denote shift of speaker.

The double jose saramago