In March 1942, Camus told the writer André Malraux that he wanted to understand what plague meant for humanity: ‘Said like that it might sound strange,’ he added, ‘but this subject seems so natural to me.’Ĭamus was not writing about one plague in particular, nor was this narrowly, as has sometimes been suggested, a metaphoric tale about the recent Nazi occupation of France.
He read books on the Black Death that killed 50 million people in Europe in the 14th century the Italian plague of 1629 that killed 280,000 people across the plains of Lombardy and the Veneto, the great plague of London of 1665 as well as plagues that ravaged cities on China’s eastern seaboard during the 18th and 19th centuries. In order to write the book, Camus immersed himself in the history of plagues. Soon an epidemic seizes Oran, the disease transmitting itself from citizen to citizen, spreading panic and horror in every street. He has read enough about the structure of plagues and transmissions from animals to humans to know that something is afoot. The rats are removed – and the town heaves a sigh of relief but Dr Rieux suspects that this is not the end. The inhabitants accuse the authorities of not acting fast enough.
Soon the town is overrun with the mysterious deaths of thousands of rats, who stumble out of their hiding places in a daze, let out a drop of blood from their noses and expire. Then, with the pacing of a thriller, the horror begins. ‘Oran is an ordinary town,’ writes Camus, ‘nothing more than a French Prefecture on the coast of Algeria.’ The inhabitants lead busy money-centered and denatured lives they barely notice that they are alive. The book – written in sparse, haunting prose – takes us through a catastrophic outbreak of a contagious disease in the lightly fictionalised town of Oran on the Algerian coast, as seen through the eyes of the novel’s hero, a Doctor Rieux, a version of Camus himself.Īs the novel opens, an air of eerie normality reigns.
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