Krishna
Albert Camus can be a difficult author to read. Way back, when I was a student in a university I read The Rebel by the same author, not because of the fact that I had liked his works but for the sake of showing off my intellectual pretensions. I remember suffering through many pages of it where Camus was still defining a who a rebel is. Hopefully, with maturity, i can possibly understand better the attraction of this famous author’s pen. Let us see.
The story starts with Doctor Bernard Rieux in a small “boring” town of Oran in a corner of France. (You know that Albert, born in Algeria wrote only in French, about France generally, don’t you?) He comes across one dead rat and it slowly escalates into rats being dead all over the town. Even then no one suspects anything – for one thing, it was the 1940’s and second, the real culprit was not common in the Western world except for the famous bubonic variety that devastated a significant portion of the world population so far ago.
Then the doctor’s building janitor looks sickly. Meanwhile the doctor’s mother arrives for a visit. The gruesome scenes of dead rats being transported in boxes – they filled the boxes, and being heaped in garbage bins on the street or simply lying in a large line in the gutters – is well described. Even with the proliferation, the people and even the city council thought that it was just a problem of getting rid of the bodies of rats. (Collecting and incinerating them).
People are coming to the doctor now with swelling in the joints and pain – the now famous symptoms of the plague but then a novelty and a puzzle.
Dr Rieux realizes that this is the start of a plague but still he cannot imagine or even take seriously that the plague could get worse in his little town ‘filled with such eccentric characters’.
Bur Rieux realizes the dangers of non action and argues forcefully for emergency measures to combat. The city is cautious and does not want to ‘admit it has a plague until we know beyond any doubt’. Rieux argues that if they don’t want to see up to half the population wiped out they should start taking this seriously now, evrn if they do not officially call it ‘the plague’.
There is not much to summarize in the descriptions. The town, after ignoring the seriousness of their plight wakes up and then the country orders the whole town quarantined. The people do not realize what it means for people who were already out but now could not come back. Even letters were banned for fear of inspection. So banal to describe but in the hands of Camus, each of these descriptions is a delight to read. Only he can describe mundane things with such lovely prose and descriptions to keep you engaged. The gradual escalation of the cases is also told with slightly escalating pace, catching the populace and even the local administration by surprise at every step.
What is of note is that Father Peneloux gives a ‘fire and brimstone’ sermon castigating the populace that ‘God is angry and just like the Old Testament has visited the plague on the townspeople who have sinned in the hope that repentance at a later date would wash away their sins’. He warns that even now the evil angel, in the service of God, could be targeting their very homes and they will die of plague when they return to their homes after this sermon!
As I said, there is not much of a story: it is how an entire French town, quarantined, copes with an outbreak of the plague. But the ride is interesting. We learn how the suburbia comes by tram to the city and how, in the overcrowded tram, each tries to show only their back to their neighbours ‘to avoid contagion’. The slow realization of the populace of the predicament they are in and some trying to escape in desperation, injuring themselves in a scuffle with the police, all are told in a leisurely manner, with you, the reader, realizing the uptick of the anxiety slowly.
He goes into depths of how concerned citizens, realizing that the authorities are not doing enough, organize civic groups to spread the message of sanitation and help in whatever way they can. This is what I mean. The story is simply about how one bewildered small town in France coped with the quarantine and the plague epidemic in its midst. Surprise, denial, all of it. There is no other story as such.
Despite that, some descriptions are fascinating. For instance how the town’s population dealt with the accelerating rate of death in terms of arranging funerals, how the funerals needed to limit even family time because of fear of contagion, are all absolutely fascinating to read. In one instance, having run out of coffins, they removed the body for burial, disinfected the coffin and reused it!
Also interesting is how the town, after an initial frustration even took the separation from their loved ones in their stride, how many lost jobs and worked as funereal assistants for pay. There is a lot to read here – not as a thriller but as a story that describes the battles of an isolated, quarantined village coping with the raging epidemic in its midst.
The story moves slowly and inexorably to the reduction in death tolls, the hopes raised and the fears of a relapse among the populace, and the end of the plague after one last lashing on a familiar figure.
The prose is thought provoking and scintillating. No twists or turns but poignant all the same.
If you are not hankering for a page-turner thriller and want to read a weighty but slow description of how a small French town battled the plague, the isolation, and the people who were caught in it – even those visiting for a short time – and prose that just flows along, you can’t go wrong in picking this book.
7/10
— Krishna