Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 19 Sep 2019

Another view on Albert Camus’ The Plague

The earlier Letterpress review prompted me to reread Camus’ The Plague for the first time in a good number of years and it struck me – yet again – that the book is both more complex and more nuanced than I invariably remember it being. Each time I read it it turns out to be not quite the book I think it is.

For one thing, it is at times darkly humorous. It also has a quiet, intimate tone, deeply philosophical, due largely to the first person narrative. It has echoes of Conrad’s Marlow books (especially the quintessentially Conradian Heart of Darkness), but we are also reminded of other later writers who have drawn on Conrad’s legacy – Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby, for instance, or WG Sebald in almost all of his hybrid fiction-reportage, but especially The Rings of Saturn.

But the thing that always strikes me with the force of surprise is that it is by no means the straightforward allegorical novel of European fascism and totalitarianism that I recall it being.  For instance, although I know full well that it isn’t the case, I am always surprised to find that The Plague isn’t set in a contaminated, chaotic Paris awaiting liberation. It is set in the ugly, nondescript North African port town of Oran in Camus’ native Algeria, where under French colonial rule bitter racism towards the Arab Muslim population as well pieds-noirs – ‘black-feet’, those of French or European origin born in Algeria under French rule – was commonplace, especially when the latter returned to mainland France.

There are then several other underlying themes twined inseparably together in The Plague: French colonialism, collaboration (in all its forms and whether a collaboration of deed and action or of thought and acquiescence), and racism.

I think there is also another theme that is rarely commented on and that is language itself. Monsieur Grand, a minor local civil servant, emerges in the narrator’s eyes as a quiet and unassuming hero – partly for the role he plays in helping to administer the volunteer ‘sanitation squads’, but also for his eccentric, perhaps even misguided, dedication to his very particular literary project. For the book that the doctor Rieux thinks he is writing, and which preoccupies him in every hour of his free time, turns out not to be a book but merely the opening sentence, and what has become Grand’s life’s work is perfecting this opening sentence: it is – as Camus seems to make clear on a number of occasions and in various contexts – a kind of battle for the truth.

It is these supplementary themes and ideas that make The Plague such a rich and nuanced reading experience. Its depth and complexity of light and shade make it a far more subtle book than the kind of black-and-white polemic it might in other hands have been. “They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.” Rather like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Camus’ masterpiece seems to get truer the more one reads it, and its relevance grows wider, more varied and more subtle.

 

Alun Severn

September 2019