Review » The Plague, by Albert Camus » (Reviewed by Wil C. Fry)

Full Title: The Plague
Author: Albert Camus
Year: 1947
Genre: Fiction, Novel
Publisher: Vintage International
ISBN 0-679-72021-9 (trade paperback)
Wikipedia page
Author’s Wikipedia Page

Summary

The Plague tells the tale of a fictional outbreak of plague in the real city of Oran, Algeria — the same country where author Albert Camus was born. It begins with a description of the city — including “ordinary”, “ugly”, and “it has a smug, placid air” — and moves quickly to the outbreak and plague, which occupy the entire book.

The narrative is told, oddly, in the third person. It is odd because one of the main characters in the story is later revealed to be “the narrator”, and even the narrator speaks of himself in the third person. It is unclear what purpose Camus had in mind for this odd narrative form.

The book is considered an "existentialist classic", though Camus protested that he himself was “not an existentialist”. I wasn’t familiar with either Camus or this book until I read it in 2018.

What I Liked Least About It

Some of the passages are laborious and unnecessarily framed in a complicated manner. I don’t know how much of this is due to the translator and how much is due to Camus’ original text. But this was a minor complaint and I have come to expect it in older writing.

The lack of emotion throughout bothered me a little too. Don’t misunderstand; the narrator describes “the people” having emotions — but only when he speaks of the town’s population as a group. When he describes individual characters, however, there is a distinct lack of emotional description. Often only their words are portrayed, and sometimes incidental actions, such as: “Richard hesitated, then fixed his eyes on Rieux.”

What I Liked Most About It

I think what I enjoyed most was that Camus created various characters, each with his own eccentricities. Without taking up too much space, he easily gave back stories and physical descriptions of the various men (almost entirely men) in the story. I’ve read far too many stories in which all the characters speak similarly, and seem very much like each other; this wasn’t the case here.

And I enjoyed the plot overall. Perhaps my favorite kind of story is what I call the “what-if” story. “What if a medium-sized city in French-occupied Algeria experienced an outbreak of bubonic plague?” is the gist of this one. And I like when I can tell, as a reader, that this is the kind of story I’m reading. It allows the author to freely explore any number of themes, from morality, to government, to humankind’s place in the universe, all while seemingly answering that single question.

Further Discussion

Several things struck me while reading, but I will mention only a couple from the end.

Three pages from the end, one of the oft-mentioned characters apparently has “gone mad”, and a great number of policemen are called upon to settle the situation. Once Cottard (the man’s name) is taken into custody, his “arms pinioned behind him by two police officers” and “still screaming”, we read this:

“A policeman went up and dealt him two hard blows with his fists, quite calmly, with a sort of conscientious thoroughness... Cottard had fallen backwards, and the policeman launched a vigorous kick into the crumpled mass sprawling on the ground.”
— pg. 305

I was struck, not by the violence in policing — which one would expect from the time period and from the tense situation, nor by the fact that no one spoke up against this — again because of the time period and situation, but by the fact that we still expect this sort of thing today. Of course, in the 1940s, you would have had to be an eye-witness to know this sort of thing goes on. Today, nearly weekly videos show needlessly violent policing.

Secondly, on the very last page, Camus seems to give a moral to the tale — which was mostly without useful lessons, I think. He says that among the reasons Rieux (the narrator) chose to “compile this chronicle” was “to state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.” Whether this was his intention all along or a thought that came to the author as he finished his work, I found it a fitting wrap-up of the story.

Whether or not the story backs this claim, and whether or not real-life experience leads us to believe this, I find life is more easily lived when we behave as if other humans are more likely to be good than to be evil.

Conclusion

It was, I’m certain, coincidence that both my children were diagnosed with pneumonia as I read this book. It is also surely coincidence that I myself got sick for the first time in three years. But these facts didn’t escape my notice.

I don’t think I will either recommend or not recommend this book, as I usually decide at the end of each review. I think the sort of people who will enjoy this book will hear of it and be drawn to it, and the sort of people who won’t benefit from it will be steered away, quite without my assistance.

Note: A shorter version of this review is available on Goodreads, here.