Tell us about Blindness.

It’s a novel about a city, and ultimately a country, being struck by an entirely unexplained plague of blindness, which rapidly transforms this civilized society into anarchy. I chose it because it brings up the question of what conditions are necessary for sanity and what happens when you take those conditions away, and also the idea that mental or physical wellbeing are really quite narrow states. They depend on all things being equal: things like having enough resources, having physical ability and a basic sense of justice and shared logic and so on, and Blindness highlights how close any of us are from becoming mentally unwell and unstable without those. The epidemic appears from nowhere, and the state locks the afflicted people away into a mental asylum to try to control it. They don’t give them food, but they have access to medicine. But they can’t control the epidemic, and soon everybody is affected and all hell breaks loose. The people become like animals – they kill each other to get food and by the end of it there are corpses lying all over the streets. It’s obviously a sort of allegory and a kind of literary sci-fi. I don’t think he’s trying to be subtle at all. It’s very disturbing, very powerful writing; Saramago’s a brilliant writer. It’s beautifully challenging: he doesn’t use punctuation, except for full stops, and he doesn’t use speech marks. None of the characters have names, they’re just given titles like "the Doctor", or "the Doctor’s wife" and their speech just runs together. It’s usually quite clear who’s speaking, but it’s muffled: like everyone’s just surfacing from water.

He denies the reader a certain amount of sensory perception?

Exactly: there’s very little about what people look like, obviously, because everyone’s blind, so you feel you’re sort of lost in this world as well. In Blindness it’s just one physical defect that renders all of civilization completely useless, and disordered, and inhumane.

Your next book?

The Forgetting is a very lucid and well-written portrait of Alzheimer’s disease. It gives a sort of biography and history of the disease, using medical and anecdotal sources and case histories. Each chapter begins with a quote from an Alzheimer’s sufferer, the first of which is "I have lost myself" which is something that the first diagnosed Alzheimer’s sufferer reportedly said. The book talks about people having really lost themselves to this disease, which it perceives as an entity in itself, almost like an alien invasion. He treats it as this thing that’s come upon us with epidemic proportions. Although the world would be a better place without it, there’s an awful lot that we can learn about ourselves and the way that we work and think by looking at the disease. It helps us to see layers of the mind. Schenk discusses quite a well-known theory: he maps out the human brain and shows the development of Alzheimer’s in its various stages, and shows how it’s an almost true undoing of the brain, which unravels in the exact order that it develops. His idea is that by looking at the disease and the progress of it you can actually learn a lot about the way that the brain works and how it develops in our early life and understand more about what it is that makes us tick. I’m not sure there’s anything that people who suffer from Alzheimer’s do that the rest of us don’t do – they just do it in an extreme and alarming way. I think that’s why it’s such an interesting disease, because we can all relate to it. Not just because we’re afraid of it, but because we already know what it’s like to experience some of those things in a more watered-down way.

And Iris?

It’s very different to The Forgetting, even though they’re vaguely about the same subject. It’s not a portrait of Alzheimer’s at all: it’s a portrait of a person, and Bayley treats the disease as if it’s just another aspect of this person. He never loses sight of Iris, and in a way his view of her becomes sharper and sharper as the book develops. He doesn’t really view Alzheimer’s as a disease so much as a kind of bad sort that Iris has got herself mixed up with, which, as he loves her, he’ll put up with. He’ll tolerate it being around while they’re having dinner, and he’ll even join in with it. He sits and watches Teletubbies with her and actually quite immerses himself in the experience. There’s real sense of the disease being just a facet of her personality, and I think it’s a really interesting way of viewing it. A few reviews of the book said that it’s a love story and then commend the fact that it’s not a very sentimental love story. I’m not so sure that it’s a love story as such: it’s more than that. It’s more of an ode to freedom, and to Iris Murdoch as a free and self-directing, self-possessed person who has not chosen, but has built the disease into her sense of herself and of her freedom, and he doesn’t want to take that away from her. I think that’s what makes it such a touching book – much more than it being a love story, it’s more about preserving her as she is and was. As a philosopher Iris Murdoch was very concerned with the idea of freedom, and yet the characters in her books were often not very free individuals, stuck in weird and constrained situations. I got the sense that Bayley didn’t want to make her a constrained character in his book, and wanted to keep her alive and as she was in real life. It’s a very beautiful book because it doesn’t yield to the disease: it describes it, and he’s horrified by it, and there are a lot of bleak moments. But he’s really intent on seeing her as she is.