In times of trouble many people seek consolation in books, but I was still surprised (and flattered) to be asked, here in Greece, if I intended to write a book about COVID-19. No, I don’t, was my answer, mainly because I don’t feel at all equal to the task. I’m sure, however, that many books will appear quite soon.
Margaret Atwood, always one for dystopia, has already written a piece about her self-isolation activities, for example. And the 21st century certainly needs a great work. Daniel Defoe wrote Journal of the Plague Year in the 18th century, Mary Shelley produced The Last Man in the 19th, and Albert Camus, on the way to his Nobel Prize, published La Peste/The Plague in 1947.
The next surprise came in the shape of an email from a very ex-student in Victoria. Do you remember teaching The Plague to our class? The mists of time were more like an old London pea-souper fog, but they eventually parted, and I recalled that I have taught Camus’ novel twice, at two different schools. But the days of the blithe, heedless 25-year-old are long gone, together with any memory of the lessons, so I can’t think now that I taught it very well.
The question, however, goaded me into action, so I dusted off my ancient paperback copy of The Plague, bought in long-ago Australia for 70 cents. (Those were the days!) A contemporary in Melbourne dragged her copy out as well, while an Athenian friend thought re-reading this particular book at this particular time was an extraordinary thing to be doing.
What turned out to be extraordinary, the Melburnian and I agreed, was the familiarity of the subject matter, and the routines that Camus makes the authorities of the plague-ridden Algerian town Oran put in place: the quarantine, the isolation hospitals, the attempts to develop a vaccine, the volunteer health workers, and the way in which funerals were conducted in haste. Then there was the idea that the plague was ‘the flail of God,’ and even mention of ‘the flattening of the curve.’
The Plague is often thought of as an allegory for Vichy France, because Camus began the book during the German occupation, and was active in the Resistance. But the novel is far more than that, and shows, quite brilliantly and through a variety of characters, the complexity of human nature. Oran was a town dedicated to the making