Exile and the Kingdom     by Albert Camus, Translated by Justin O’Brien Original title: L’EXIL ET LA ROYAUME Original language: French Published by Penguin Pub. Date: June 1989 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 160 pages ISBN: 0140180109 List Price: £5.99 Not available for ordering Published by HAMILTON Pub. Date: 1958 Pub. Place: UK Format: 156 pages Not available for ordering

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The pellucid, icy night air of the Algerian desert cuts through the first story in this collection like a laser and sets the geographical agenda for many of the others. For the settler populations of Algeria’s coastal towns (of whom Camus was a member) the vast desert interior of the country remained distant and untamed, inhabited by ferocious tribes, loyal to one another, fanatical and implacable in their resistance to the French. This ambiguous status marks Camus’ portrait of these lands. The story The Adulterous Woman introduces us not to the romantic image of spreading sands but to the rocky reality of the south and the permanent taste of dust. A small trader, his business shattered by World War II, is forced to take to the road in a desperate effort to sell his goods directly in the interior. Rather than leave his wife he takes her along too. Cramped in bumpy buses, caught in the expressionless gaze of the inhabitants of these harsh lands, she begins to doubt herself, to question her relationship with her husband, her life, everything that she believes in. Finally, late at night and stretched out under the stars, the realisation hits her that the void in her life is as huge as this desert night. But Camus provides no resolution here and returning to the hotel and her husband she remains an exile from the kingdom of her own soul...


The second story, The Renegade explores more orthodox questions of faith, but the background sense of fear that lurked in the first story here erupts into cruelty and terror unparalleled in the rest of Camus’ work. From a childhood in the Massif Central to life in a Catholic seminary, the story’s central character has felt a deep, bull-headed calling to serve God in the most inhospitable lands. Fired by the stories of a half-blind priest and against all advice he heads into the Algerian deep south in search of a fabled white city of salt from which the sightless priest had barely escaped with his life. Arriving there though he is quickly convinced that conversion of these ‘savages’ is simply not on the agenda in this bleak wilderness. Worse still, it is he that is to be converted. Force-fed a diet of beatings and humiliation he comes to love his new masters and renounce his God and the myths of the West turning instead to the fetish god of the city of salt. Even this is not enough to save him and the story ends with the sun coming up over the desert with the enslaved missionary, his tongue cut out, staked out on the sand to die.


The taste of dust encountered in the first story now becomes the taste of salt as it concludes, ‘A handful of salt fills the mouth of the garrulous slave’. While it might be seen as having parallels with the death of explorer and religious mystic de Foucauld, himself martyred in the deep south, this story stands next to the Saharan tales of American novelist Paul Bowles in its unflinching depiction of degradation.


Camus was never facile and the third story is a complex interrogation of fate and justice and the control which people have over their own destinies. Yvars is a cooper, but casks and barrels are no longer in demand and the boss of the small firm he works for is not able to give the men a pay-rise. Their subsequent strike fails and the men refuse to greet their employer despite his efforts to play the munificent employer with a big heart. Still their solidarity must not be compromised and they continue their silence in the face of his efforts to explain his own position. Fate, however, continues to taunt them. The boss’ son is suddenly taken gravely ill. Now the men themselves start to feel a brooding sense of guilt, implicated in the sickness, but without understanding why. Returning home in the evening to his wife Yvars relates his day. If only they were younger they could have escaped this destiny and left Algeria to journey across the sea back to the northern shores of the Mediterranean. The simplicity of the story contains something prophetic for this sentiment presages the real fact that those like Yvars and his wife would very soon be forced to take that journey back to France under very different circumstances. For Camus this was a human tragedy; he was never able to simply write off the whole non-Arab/non-Berber population of Algeria as some despicable settler element unworthy of consideration.


Nevertheless, somehow he sensed that the world he knew was changing irrevocably. This sense of loss, of uncomprehending destiny, is most fully realised in the central story in this collection, The Guest. Nowhere in his work does Camus express his ambivalence with the Algerian Arab population so graphically. Daru, the schoolmaster, born in Algeria, a lover of its countryside, runs a small schoolhouse in a remote region. His duties also include distributing grain in times of famine. An Arab is brought to the school by a local gendarme who declares that Daru, as a ‘European’, must escort the prisoner to the nearest town — the police cannot spare a man to do this themselves. The Arab captive has been bound, but Daru has him untied. Daru’s revolt consists of a refusal to play the role of escort and instead of delivering the prisoner to ‘justice’ he feeds him and treats him with compassion. Rather than follow the policeman’s instructions he leads the Arab only part of the way and leaves him with food and money after having pointed out the direction of the town. He also provides another alternative, pointing in the direction of nomadic tribes of the interior who will take him in and shelter him. The choice is left with the generic ‘Arab’ whom Camus has constructed.


The way Camus tells the story, after pausing immobile for a while the man trudges towards town and prison rather than choose freedom. History, of course, rewrote this ending, but also amplifies a certain prescience on Camus’ part. When he returns to the little schoolhouse, Daru is greeted by a message chalked up on the blackboard, ‘You handed over our brother, you will pay for this’. The tragedy of the eventual impossibility of reconciliation and peaceful co-existence in Algeria, whatever the individual attitudes, racist or not, is prefigured and seen also in the Algerian Rachid Boujedra’s book The Repudiation, also reviewed here.


Not all the stories are set against an Algerian background. The Painter at Work is a dark exploration of renown and productivity in the art world. Jonas, a guileless artist ‘following his own star’, as he puts it, finds some sort of success with his work, but then, for reasons he fails to comprehend, falls from critical grace. In his pursuit of his art he neglects his family and drives himself to the point of insanity, in a perhaps very truthful portrait of the human conflicts of a dedicated, ‘obsessive’ artist (like Camus himself).


The final story, The Growing Stone, is set in Brazil and is a vibrant study in redemption pitched against a background of poverty, which sets a seal on Algeria in a sense and sends Camus the writer in different directions, an exile himself now in different kingdoms. This thin volume must be amongst the most powerful short story collections ever published.

‘Daru surveyed the two directions. There was nothing but the sky on the horizon. Not a man could be seen. He turned towards the Arab, who was looking at him blankly. Daru held out the package to him. «Take it,» he said. «There are dates, bread, and sugar. You can hold out for two days. Here are a thousand francs too.» The Arab took the package and the money but kept his full hands at chest level as if he didn’t know what to do with what was being given him. «Now look,» the schoolmaster said as he pointed in the direction of the east, «there’s the way to Tinguit. You have a two-hour walk. At Tinguit you’ll find the administration and the police. They are expecting you.» The Arab looked towards the east, still holding the package and the money against his chest. Daru took his elbow and turned him rather roughly towards the south. At the foot of the height on which they stood could be seen a faint path. «That’s the trail across the plateau. In a day’s walk from here you’ll find pasture land and the first nomads. They’ll take you in and shelter you according to their law.»’ p80-81 (from The Guest)