[3]
By
Published: 2005
Category: Fiction [4]
Most readers know 'The Plague,' the 1948 masterpiece by Albert Camus, el because it was Assigned Reading in school. If you were taking something like 20th Century Thought, you read it in English. If you were studying French, you struggled through it in the original. Either way, the pages are, for you, spoiled by the chalk dust of the classroom.
What you remember is this: The novel is an allegory. The plague stands for the spread of Nazi ideology. The book is a study of how a community reacts to a deadly invasion that isolates it. How should people act when faced with a daily threat to life? How can they survive when an arbitrary fate marks some for immediate death, others for a later grave? What do citizens owe their neighbors? And, in the end, what does it all mean?
These are questions that have excited A-students for decades now --- and bored the rest of the class to tears.
Well, 'The Plague' is a better book than the one taught in schools. For one thing, it has a remarkably sympathetic narrator in Dr. Rieux, who is first to notice something amiss --- rats appearing in unlikely places, their bodies twitching and blood spurting from their mouths. Rieux's wife has just gone to a French sanitarium in the hope of a cure for her tuberculosis; confinement is much on his mind.
Oran, Algeria --- the coastal city where Camus lived in 1942, and his setting for his novel --- may overlook water, but its energies are dull and worldly. People worship money and devote all their time to making it. Love flourishes briefly, then dissolves into habit. Government is slow and formal; it is shockingly late before it agrees that frothing rats and dying people have any connection.
In short, a thoroughly modern city.
Okay, 'The Plague' isn't fun to read. How could it be --- this is the account of a doctor who spends twenty hours a day watching people die. And yet I couldn't put the novel down, for it describes --- with great precision --- the stages of this kind of disaster. At first, Dr. Rieux notes, people were "worried and irritated." Their first reaction: "to abuse the authorities." (Sound familiar?) Later, we hear that "officialdom can never cope with something really catastrophic." (Where have you heard that before?) "The newspapers, needless to say, complied with the instructions given them: optimism at all costs." (Bet that's not an idea new to you.)
The book has so many one-liners I started underlining them. "When an abstraction sets to killing you, you've got to get busy with it" and "One grows out of pity when it's useless" are modest samples of the brainpower at work here. But where the book really achieves greatness is in the last 50 pages, where Camus spells out the origin of the plague (it's in us, in each and every one of us) and what that means for our lives together. There's great tenderness beneath this savage analysis --- there's "the passionate indignation we feel when confronted by the anguish all men share."
The fight against terror is "never ending." But fighting it is our lot, indeed our glory. Can anything save us? Camus praises "human love," but that doesn't seem equal to the cruel challenges of malevolence. He tries again: "We learn in times of pestilence....there are more things to admire in men than to despise." That message --- harsh and lyrical, terrible and ennobling --- is worth a hundred bromides from the feelgood gurus who crowd the airwaves with solutions that solve nothing.
'The Plague' is 308 pages of pure sanity.