The great English critic of the 1930s and 40s Cyril Connolly called The Outsider ‘the flower of a pagan and barrenly philistine culture’, meaning that this powerful, unusual book had sprung from and could only have sprung from the life of the European community in Algeria of which Camus was a part. It was a recently formed but prosperous settler society, existing without the graces and self-delusions of established ‘historical’ societies. In this it resembled Mark Twain’s America or contemporary Israel — harsh, competitive and rather boorish societies whose writers tend to be energetic, sarcastic and lucid.


The Outsider is, like The First Man and A Happy Death, the story of a young man reaching, in extremity, an intense, almost ecstatic point of self-knowledge. The background to this journey to self-awareness is a pagan, modern world, a world of frank sensuality between men and women, a world of strong light and sun, of fierce boredom and sharp pleasures, more or less the world we all live in today (weather excepted).


The ‘Outsider’ himself is Meursault, a clerk whose life grinds away between days in the office and nights in the cinema, outings to the beach and afternoons of lovemaking with a superficial but attractive girlfriend. It is an existence in which he essentially indifferent. More or less thoughtlessly he manages to shoot a man on the beach and is rapidly transformed from being an ordinary man to a reviled murderer.


Facing the blank wall of the condemned cell, rejecting the ministrations of the chaplain and the socially-approved consolations of Christianity, he comes face-to-face with life really for the first time. He only begins to live his life authentically in the moment it is to be taken away.


Written in a prose of a Lorca-like clarity and keenness, Camus’ subtle picture of Meursault’s emptiness; his empty soul and empty life in an empty country is the theme of one of the major literary works of our century.

‘Just then the street-lamps came on, all together, and they made the stars that were beginning to glimmer in the night sky paler still. I felt my eyes getting tired, what with the lights and all the movement I’d been watching in the street. There were little pools of brightness under the lamps, and now and then a tramcar passed, lighting up a girl’s hair, or a smile, or a silver bangle.’ p32