The Plague by Albert Camus

The townspeople of Oran are in the grip of a virulent plague.

Cut off from the rest of the world, living in fear, they each respond in their own way to the grim challenge of the deadly bacillus. Among them is Dr Rieux, a humanitarian and healer, and it is through his eyes that we witness the devastating course of the epidemic.

Written in 1947, just after the Nazi occupation of France, Camus’s magnificent novel is also a story of courage and determination against the arbitrariness and seeming absurdity of human existence.

When Albert Camus wrote this book, I doubt he realised how familiar the scenario would be 75 years later.

I generally avoid reading dystopian or apocalyptic literature because I worry enough about the world as it is and I don’t need ideas about how much worse it could be! However, I decided to read The Plague at a time when heavy Covid restrictions were in place as I was curious about what kinds of parallels there might be between a real-life pandemic and a fictional one. The answer: lots.

The book begins with a suspicious number of rats dying in the streets of Oran, a town in northern Algeria. Nobody pays this any particular attention other than to clear the rats away, until residents begin to contract and die from the plague, caused by the rats. As the number of plague cases rises, the authorities react by closing the town and cancelling incoming and outgoing transport and postal services. People (including Dr Rieux) find themselves separated from their friends and relatives who are outside the town. Anxieties rise with the increasing death toll, which is reported on the news each day. As the epidemic continues, unrest begins to break out.

In our current world, the fictional events of The Plague can obviously be compared to the world’s response to the Covid pandemic. At the time, however, the book caused literary critics to draw parallels with the Nazi occupation of large parts of Europe. I query whether Camus consciously intended this, not least because a plague is a natural disaster which arguably undermines the fact that the Nazi crimes were human choices. Nonetheless, I do agree that the common question between The Plague and Nazism is what options ordinary people have in extreme circumstances such as these. In both a pandemic and a political crisis, people can choose to protect themselves, prioritise saving others, partake in perpetuating the issue, or do nothing. The events in The Plague exemplify the tension between these choices.

Reading this book was a slightly strange experience. On the one hand, I was less alarmed by the events in the book than were probably intended by its author. At one point I even found myself envying the characters because their epidemic only lasted for nine months. On the other hand, I found it alarming in itself that I had become so desensitised to what were supposed to be interpreted as apocalyptic events.

It might be interesting to read The Plague again in a decade or so. Will it invoke a strange nostalgia, similar to the nostalgia of the ‘war spirit’? Or will I dread to be reminded of the ominous news stories and the feeling of being trapped in one place and suspended in time?