The following day, no one died.

This sentence, ripe with the promise of eternity, begins Portuguese author Jose Saramago's new novel Death At Intervals, set in an unnamed Roman Catholic country with a constitutional monarchy - enough detail to feel intimate, yet general enough to feel universal.

Paradise on earth? Not quite. Part of living, it seems, is dealing with one disaster after another. Suddenly out of work, undertakers lobby the government to make it mandatory for people to observe funeral rites for pets. Clergyman cry that the death of death cannot be the will of God, for 'without death there is no resurrection, and without resurrection there is no church'.

Insurance companies concoct new terms for life insurance policies, stating that reaching the age of 80 will count as a legal death, while the government has to ban terminally ill people from crossing the borders after neighbouring countries, where death is still in service, complain of an influx of people coming in to die on their land.

As the government and the military lock horns over the guarding of the borders, the omniscient narrator wryly notes a popular phrase making the rounds: '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 85-year-old Nobel Prize winner's books tend to centre on a single, unconventional change in our accepted reality. Blindness examines the aftermath of a plague that leaves almost an entire population without sight, while in his most well-known novel, The Gospel According To Jesus Christ, he imagines that Jesus was Joseph's son, not God's.

By introducing an unexpected element into an otherwise ordinary reality - in this case, the cessation of death - he puts reality under a microscope. He takes on the issue of ageing societies by imagining the increase in not-dead people clogging up hospitals and nursing homes, and makes a strong case for euthanasia in the example of a gravely ill grandfather who asks his children to take him across the border, along with an eternally dying grandson.

This novel is basically an extended thought experiment, and Saramago's distinctive style of depicting conversation, with page-long paragraphs of dialogue where a change in speaker is marked only by a comma and the capitalisation of the first letter, is initially confusing. However, it ultimately creates the effect of an internal but lively philosophical debate. And his omniscient narrator's voice - at turns sarcastic, solicitous, bombastic and urbane - is a sheer pleasure to read.

But just as people are settling into the groove of living forever, a violet letter arrives from death (spelt, as she herself specifies, with a lower-case d). In it, she informs the populace that from now on, people will be alerted of their death a week in advance by post, so that they may tidy up their lives before they go.

Much dark comedy ensues when her consideration plunges the country into hysteria. More philosophically, questions are raised as to whether the uncertainty of death's arrival (if not of death itself) is a prerequisite for living. And a handwriting expert concludes, confidently, that death is a serial killer.

But the book shifts away from its biting satire towards something more meditative when death mysteriously finds one of her letters returned, unopened. She has no choice but to seek out this defiant being, a 50-year-old cellist, herself. As she takes on human form, she discovers why people live, love and are essentially human, an emotional process which involves her listening to the cellist play and having his dog sit in her lap.

The unsurprising ending will seem sweet to some, a cop-out to others. This reviewer favours the latter. Still, as the old saying goes, it is the journey, not the destination, that matters. You know, something like life and death.

If you like this, read: The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (1915, $18.94 with GST, Books Kinokuniya). The protagonist wakes up one morning and discovers he has transformed into a large bug.

DEATH AT INTERVALS
By Jose Saramago, translated by Margaret Jull Costa
Harvill Secker/ Paperback/ 96 pages/
$32.95 with GST/Books Kinokuniya/****

This article was first published in The Sunday Times on Apr 6, 2008.