The Plague     by Albert Camus, Translated by Stuart Gilbert Original title: La Peste Original language: French Published by Random House, Incorporated Pub. Date: 1991 Format: Paperback Dimensions: (in inches): 0.69 x 7.95 x 5.21 ISBN: 0679720219 List Price: $12.00 Buy online from Amazon.com for $9.60 Published by PENGUIN & HAMILTON Pub. Date: 1989 Pub. Place: UK Format: 252 pages List Price: £5.99 Not available for ordering Published by Hutchinson Pub. Date: 1967 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback Not available for ordering Published by FOLIO SOCIETY Pub. Date: 1987 Pub. Place: UK Format: 248 pages Not available for ordering Published by Charnwood Pub. Date: 1984 Pub. Place: UK List Price: £6.95 Not available for ordering

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There’s a kind of cold streak in Camus, an austere distance from the world that many trace to his family background, specifically his grandmother who he portrayed in a piece called Courage translated in his Youthful Writings. A Grandmother who was completely self-possessed (and domineering) and a great influence on the young boy growing up without a father in a working-class quarter of Algiers, capital of what was then the French colony of Algeria. Such a layer of ice sometimes provides the detachment necessary to be a great and honest observer of human realities, and it is perhaps this, in a world that would rather enjoy soft-centred and romantic views, that make Camus uniquely valuable as a twentieth century artist and witness.


The subject of The Plague is a community abruptly forced to live within the narrow boundaries of extremity — quite suddenly death is loose on the streets of a mundane and business-minded city. Literally this death is a rat-borne epidemic or plague, metaphorically it is Nazism. The moral truth of the novel draws from Camus’ experience of the Occupation and the Resistance in France, when ordinary lives had to contend with an equally extreme situation every day.


The Plague is a genius’ portrait of the harshest moment of our century. Although filled with personally felt experiences of involuntary exile, anger against the Occupation and all the compromises that went with it as well as the terror of resisting the Gestapo machine, it uses entirely other colours, brushes and landscape to speak of this time, so allowing the meaning of these events, particularly for those like the French who retained some freedom of choice, to emerge.


If there is a sense of a machine rolling over lives in The Plague, with many unwilling to admit the awfulness of what was upon them, there is also a strong sense of some (few) men making moral choices, choices to resist, to act from solidarity rather than self-interest. Without pointing fingers at collaborators Camus makes the same point as Primo Levi in his great book about the German extermination camps and their protagonists The Drowned and the Saved (reviewed in the Babel Guide to Italian Fiction) — that in the same situation and with the same degree of choice some men will act like mad beasts, some will cower until the danger has passed and some will try to act morally.


Quite apart from the moral argument is Camus’ ability to make us sense the heat, the dread, the very existence of this besieged city and population, its murderers, its mothers, its lovers, its heroes and its cowards, the strong and the weak.

‘None the less, he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never-ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.’ p251-252