It’s the 1940s in Oran, a coastal city in the Northern African country of Algeria, when, on a spring day as random as any other, rats begin crawling out of the shadows only to die violent deaths in the streets, hotels, and other public venues.
It isn’t long before the town’s physicians, including Dr. Bernard Rieux, whose ailing wife had just departed Oran to be cared for in a sanitorium, declare that bubonic plague is upon the town during a meeting with the Prefect.
Unfortunately, it takes the rest of the population a bit longer to acknowledge the outbreak, since the plague’s attack begins slowly. Bubonic plague is the last thing anyone expects. It is not until the Prefect orders the town gates closed and all vehicular transportation terminated than panic truly sets in.
While Rieux works tirelessly to treat the victims, ultimately unable to do more than keep a tally of the ever-increasing death rate, each of his colleagues and friends reacts to the crisis differently.
Dr. Castel begins formulating an inoculation against the plague once it’s realized that the medicines sent in from Paris have no effect.
An elderly town clerk, Joseph Grand struggles with his novel-in-progress, fretting over the opening sentence for months all the while struggling with the fact that his wife, Jeanne, left him as she could no longer tolerate living in poverty. Finally, Grand volunteers to assist with plague prevention.
The mysterious Cottard, a man of “independent means”, attempts to commit suicide at the onset of the plague, but is stopped by his neighbor, Grand. Cottard has a deep distrust of the police, but comes to find that while they are distracted by the plague, his seedy activities can continue unchecked.
Young journalist Raymond Rambert is only visiting Oran for a story when the town is quarantined and will go to any lengths to escape and return to his wife. When all legal means are exhausted, he turns to Cottard in desperation.
Father Paneloux, pastor of the town’s Catholic church, believes that the plague is God’s punishment and delivers a sermon to that effect, but eventually has a change of heart, stating that God will also offer succor and mercy. He then volunteers to assist Rieux with caring for the sick and is witness to the violent death of Magistrate Othon’s son.
Jean Tarrou, who quickly becomes Rieux’s closest friend, arrived in Oran just weeks before the plague erupted and decides to form teams of sanitation workers on a volunteer basis to fight the plague. Eventually, he reveals his life story to Rieux as a way of explaining why he is fiercely determined to help people when lives are at stake.
Other characters come in and out of the narrative, but the question is whether the efforts of this core team can bring an end to a plague that ravages Oran over the course of nearly a full year. The general atmosphere and attitude of the town is brilliantly depicted as the plague escalates through the seasons.
The Plague was Camus’s first book published after WWII. Contemporary readers unfamiliar with Camus—or with works written in this era—will most certainly cringe at pages of dense background information that would, in today’s termi
nology, be considered “infodumps.” There are also the occasional archaic sentence structures and words (a few even sent me to the dictionary) and outdated expressions of the time.
However, as I tend to gravitate toward classics, this style of prose is no stranger to me and is to be expected. It does nothing to diminish the enjoyment of such stories, but instead offers a glimpse into the history and evolution of literature.
story is occasionally stifled by several pages—and an entire third chapter—of purely scientific (or pseudo-scientific) discourse in the form of dense info-dumping. This is something that would never make it past a contemporary editor, of course, but as an avid reader of golden age SF novels, I’m accustomed to it. At that time, it was fairly common in the genre. Modern readers might also stumble over Heinlein’s occasional use of what would now be considered archaic grammar, but, in such cases, meaning can easily be derived from context.
