The Plague, by Albert Camus, experienced a surge in popularity as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. Now, 4-years later, its parallels with our 21st century experience are harder to identify. There are descriptive resonances, such as the clarity of birdsong and the emptiness of the streets. Then there are the psychological responses: an initial reluctance to accept that things could get worse (the first sign of trouble is rats emerging in great numbers to die in the gutters; when people fall ill, it is put down to a ‘special type of fever’); the pain of separation when the city is locked down; the urge to escape (Rambert, a journalist, schemes to bribe guards at one of the gates); the somewhat obvious sermon by the priest Paneloux, in which he blames those who die for their sins; and the adaptation of locked-down citizens who endure month after month of isolation from the rest of the world.
Camus wrote the book in 1947, and commentators have read it as allegory, describing both the tyranny of the bacillus and that of Nazi occupation. Certain paragraphs can be read on two levels. As freedoms are curtailed and the daily mortality figure rises, parallels become clear: ‘The corpses were tipped pell-mell into the pits and had hardly settled into place when spadefuls of quicklime began to sear their faces and the earth covered them indistinctively, in holes dug steadily deeper as time went on.’
The central figure is Dr Rieux, who one morning ‘felt something soft under his foot. It was a dead rat lying in the middle of the landing.’ He is the coherent, calm observer, tireless in his duty to assess feverish patients and decide if they must be taken away to one of the hastily established plague wards. Around Rieux, various personalities express their philosophies of life and demonstrate them through their actions.
The most powerful is Tarrou, who believes that we have all been infected with the plague: that is, a willingness to see people die. As a child he realised that his father, a lawyer, had spent his entire career prosecuting criminals and urging juries to send them to their deaths. Tarrou witnesses his first execution as a teenager, and recalls that, “…at this short range, the soldiers concentrate their fire on the region of the heart and their big bullets make a hole into which you could thrust your fist”. Tarrou rejects this and dedicates his life to opposing the death penalty, and death itself. He joins a sanitation team, tasked with visiting afflicted households.
Grand, a civil servant stuck in a low paid job, also volunteers, and is in the narrator’s view, ‘the true embodiment of the quiet courage […] He said yes without a moment’s hesitation…’ This sentence reminded me of the NHS workers who did not think twice about coming to work in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic when there was little protection and great uncertainty.
Oran is truly cut off from the world – the authorities seek to protect the rest of the country, not the city’s inhabitants. Newspapers continue to be printed, but there is no internet on which doubters, deniers and conspiracy theorists can thrive. In The Plague there is no vaccine hesitancy. Doctors work on a local version, which they feel will be more effective than the one sent to them by the government, and all who are offered an injection gladly receive it. About masking, Camus describes a degree of cynicism: ‘Opening one of these, he took from a sterilizer two masks of cotton-wool enclosed in muslin, handed one to Rambert, and told him to put it on. The journalist asked if it was really any use. Tarrou said no, but it inspired confidence in others.’
The most startling passage in the book describes the death of a boy, Phillipe Othon. Because a new serum has been given, the reader begins to hope that he will survive, but Camus does not pull his punch. Despite brief remissions in fever and delirium, Phillipe dies in agony. ‘For moments that seemed endless he stayed in a queer, contorted position, his body racked by convulsive tremors…’ This is witnessed by the Paneloux the priest, who ‘gazed down at the small mouth, fouled with the sordes of the plague and pouring out the angry death cry’. Paneloux’s second sermon is more nuanced, but he still declares that, ‘the love of God is hard love…and yet it alone can reconcile us to the deaths of children…’ When Paneloux develops a suspicious cough, then becomes prostrate (the plague evolves from bubonic to pneumonic), he declines medical assistance and gives himself up to God’s will, crucifix in hand, eyes fixed in ‘blank serenity’.
Next week the first dramatization of COVID-19’s impact on the UK will be broadcast – based on Rachel Clarke’s book Breathtaking. Its messages will be different, more direct, perhaps overtly political. But I think its central human themes will be similar to those found in The Plague – disbelief, horror, a sense of injustice… but, visible through it all, dedication to duty and ‘quiet courage’.
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