The Plague (La Peste) by Albert Camus (Gallimard, Paris 1947 – first English Translation Hamish Hamilton, London 1948)
I first encountered the writings of Camus in the 1980s – partly as a nascent Francophile, and partly because his novel L'Étranger is referenced in a song by The Cure. He also exuded an aura of cool; photographed as a young philosopher with a cigarette between his lips, could this dude really have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature? Not having read The Plague since then, I was surprised at the difficulty in procuring copy to refresh my memory for the Grand Bizarre’s Encyclopaedia Pandemica project. Wanting an English translation – my French being now too rusty for the original – I was eventually able to find one of the green Penguins I am so fond of; a fortunate preference as new copies were virtually impossible to get hold of. Covid-19 has put a huge premium on this and other works relating to epidemics, pandemics, plagues and pestilences. Pundits have filled the media with top-tens of plague related books and essential Covid-19 reading. The Plague is on every list. An impressive consequence if the enforced holiday reading of the lockdown is anything other than airport bestsellers.
Published in 1947, the novel is set in the port of Oran in the author’s native French Algeria, a town where he lived in the early 1940s. The book’s source material is the cholera epidemic that killed a large proportion of Oran’s inhabitants in 1849. Although depicted by Camus as bubonic plague, the instances of this disease which struck Oran between 1849 and the publication of La Peste were on a much smaller scale with deaths numbered in double figures only.
Written during and immediately after the World War II, The Plague can, on one level, be read allegorically as a metaphor for another infection – fascism – which had more recently blighted Europe; the plague pits of Oran recalling the mass-graves of the Holocaust. More recent interpretations see the work as a reflection of our relationship with an absurd materialist-capitalist society.
For those of us who have never had our lives directly affected by a pandemic, a more literal reading of The Plague offers what may seem to be uncanny and prescient parallels with our experiences during Covid-19: emergency measures being introduced in confusion, failure to impose social distancing, food shortages (mercifully, there is no mention of soap or toilet paper), the effects on funeral services, the unexpected reduction in crime rate, individuals flouting quarantine restrictions, the struggle to provide a vaccine, the constant reporting of statistics, warnings by health professionals going unheeded, restrictions on travel and using beaches, lockdown of individual houses and then suburbs, the separation of families, the possibility of health services being unable to cope, teams of voluntary workers, the triumph of common decency over heroism, public buildings being converted into temporary plague hospitals, political leaders in denial about the seriousness of the crisis, misinformation spread by the press, the potential for civil unrest where quarantine restrictions are relaxed in some geographical areas before others, the extreme sense of loss particularly over the death of children. Reading this over several days, the novel appeared to blur seamlessly with the constant stream of pandemic news flowing from every media source. Above all the integrity of the novel’s central character – Dr. Bernard Rieux – echoes our increased regard for healthcare workers as he struggles to find meaning for his own existence in a world delineated by Camus’s absurdist philosophy. The triumph of ordinary hope.
Whether you are a first-time or returning reader, the experience of The Plague will be one you will not forget. Although, Camus reminds us, we can never be fully prepared for pandemics, which reduce the advances of our culture to meaninglessness, its central message is of hope and what Sartre called being-for-others. Available on audiobook, eBook or the with the delicious smell of a vintage Penguin.
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