After 70 years, book still has disturbing power

n Trevor Grundy After 70 years, book still has disturbing power

Books should be reviewed when they’re relevant, not just when they’re written. Could any book me more important to read and understand at the moment than Albert Camus’s The Plague?

Written in 1947, the novel was published in English the following year. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four appeared several months later.

Against the backdrop of rising populism, mainly in Europe, the latter book is quoted by ad nauseam. Now we have Coronavirus sweeping the world and I believe The Plague is the book most in tune with the moment we are in.

Many literary critics say it is the greatest book ever written about a pandemic. Sales of the book have tripled in Italy, and Penguin has rushed out a reprint of its English translation by Stuart Gilbert. Ben Macintyre writing in the Times on March 14, is spot on when he says that this is a book that helps us understand the way we cope with a mysterious illness – incurable and implacable.

It was Camus’s most successful novel, written when he was 33. Within a year it was translated into nine languages, with more to come as years went by. It has never been out of print and was seen by so many as a literary

The Plague Albert Camus Translated by Stuart Gilbert Penguin Books

classic even before the author’s untimely death in a car accident in January 1964.

The Plague was written just two years after the end of World War II, suggesting that the Algerian-born Camus must have had the virus of Nazism in mind when he wrote what many of his admirers believe was his greatest novel.

But was that the only virus he had in mind? That’s debatable. The Plague is loosely based on the cholera epidemic that erupted in Oran in 1849 following the French colonisation of Algeria.

As MacIntyre says, many of the characters and themes in the Plague (La Peste) are familiar from today’s crisis. Initially, only a few people understand what’s happening when thousands of rats appear on the streets and in the homes of the citizens of Oran.

They first attempt to ignore the problem, hoping (or praying) it will go away.

Then a hero emerges: Bernard Rieux, a doctor, warns that unless immediate action is taken the entire population of the walled city will perish.

Arguments erupt about how best to control the epidemic, but by the time the authorities make up their confused minds, the emergency measures prove inefficient. The town is sealed off but even then there are people who refuse to obey safety instructions. (Lockdown tedium has already begun in Britain. As I write, I hear a football being bounced along the street where I live in a seaside town in Kent, close to a long beach normally patronised by thousands of Londoners at the start of the long Easter break. The number dead in UK hospital is now more than 5,000).

At the beginning of The Plague, many residents believed that the epidemic would soon die out and that they and their families would be spared. The Jesuit priest Pere Paneloux tells his frightened congregation the plague is a divine punishment for their sins, the most severe of which is their attendance at his church only one day every week. He doesn’t say it, but the inference is that collection plates need filling seven days a week, not just on Sundays.