Life and death in a city under quarantine
As The Plague opens, the city of Oran is being overrun with rats. They appear in droves, only to die in heaps in the streets. The cause of their demise is the bubonic plague, which soon, by way of the rodents’ fleas, spreads to the city’s human inhabitants. As the death toll climbs, and the nature of the pandemic is determined, the entire city of Oran is placed under quarantine, cut off from the outside world. The book follows the lives of a handful of characters living under these conditions. Most prominent among them is Dr. Bernard Rieux, a physician who eventually ends up leading efforts to halt the spread of the disease.
For most of its shelf life, I’m sure The Plague was a very powerful and disturbing novel. For today’s readers, however, the book has lost some of its impact due to the simple fact that we recently lived through a real plague-and-quarantine scenario with the COVID-19 virus. I would imagine death by bubonic plague is more gruesome than a COVID death, but the fear, paranoia, isolation, and grief engendered by one fatal epidemic is comparable to the other. In both cases, many people were separated from their loved ones for lengthy periods of time. In some ways, the COVID lockdown was even worse than what Camus describes in The Plague. Here Oran is isolated from the outside world, but its citizens are still free to go out and mingle in public spaces, seemingly oblivious to possible contagion. (Granted, there was no internet in the 1940s, so they couldn’t very well work from home or shop online). No mention is made of masks being worn except for one instance late in the book. Camus gives due attention to the hardships and overwork faced by medical personnel, both professionals and volunteers, but unlike in real life his doctors and nurses seem immune to the disease they’re treating.
The plague itself is not so much the focus of the book, but rather the psychological effects of living in isolation under the constant threat of death. Although the novel does include some scenes of realistic melodrama involving illness, death, and grief, the overall tone, as one might expect from Camus, is one of deadpan fatalism. While the characters try to cling to the illusion that they have some control over their own destinies, Camus emphasizes that their lives are at the mercy of indiscriminate nature in the form of the lethal plague bacteria. Each character in his own way tries to find meaning and dignity in this rather meaningless extermination of human life.
The novel’s most unforgiveable fault is its lack of female characters. Camus writes the book almost as if women don’t exist in Oran, but for one main character’s mother who plays a minor supporting role. Some of the male characters are separated from their wives and lovers, who are off in faraway cities. This allows Camus to address the issue of romantic relationships interrupted by quarantine, but it makes for a rather abstract way to go about doing it. There is no example given of a couple undergoing the plague together, nor is a single case of a woman’s experience of the plague presented at all. Even Hemingway would have included at least a nurse. While Camus perspicaciously analyzes his five male leads in admirable psychological detail, that very same narrowness of focus makes the reader feel like he’s getting a rather limited view of the scope of this catastrophe.
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