“The Plague” by Albert Camus

The Plague

By Albert Camus
1948
320 pages / 10 hours and 52 minutes
Fiction

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Sometimes you just have to abandon the plan. My task here has been to introduce ministers and interested readers to 100 excellent books written after the year 2000. But as I write this I'm sitting in my home study and, except for my daily walks, I've hardly been out of the house at all for the last month. In this situation – in quarantine, in the midst of plague, with a very uncertain future – there is one piece of fiction that cries out to be read. And though it was published in 1948 it has never been more relevant. I've always considered it one of the great achievements of 20th-century literature. So for this one book, let's break the rules.

The Plague by Albert Camus is the story of the little town of Oran in North Africa that is beset by the bubonic plague. The town is totally quarantined and thus isolated from the rest of the world. This situation will bring out the worst in human beings but also the best. The book is so brilliant because it works on so many levels. As a political novel it is a reflection on how different people reacted to Nazi domination – either as collaborators or rebels. But it is also one of the most profound secular reflections on the problem of evil and suffering.

Two of the main characters in the novel are a priest who attempts to explain the suffering of the townspeople, and a doctor who simply tries to relieve their suffering. For the doctor the suffering generally “is a never ending defeat.” He clearly reflects Camus’s convictions. Camus famously said that the world was absurd. The world does not care for people at all, and there is no God. So the best you can do is join hands and walk bravely into a meaningless and absurd future, and do it with kindness to those around you who are in the same hopeless state. When Camus was killed in a car wreck, the newspaper’s one-word headline screamed, “ABSURD!”

On the closing page is one of the most famous lines of 20th-century literature:

He should not be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favor of those plague stricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done them might endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.

I consider Camus to be one of my primary interlocutors as I try to ponder the meaning of Christian faith in the midst of plague. But I certainly hope I will not be one of those Christians who tries to explain it while doing nothing to help the suffering. Camus must be answered by those who do not believe that the world is absurd and that the only possible response is resignation.

As you are forming your own response to the situation we find ourselves in, there is no other book that presents the challenge in a more formidable way. Put down whatever you are reading at the moment and take the few hours it will require to read The Plague. And God help us.