Reading Albert Camus’ The Plague, which appeared on the Guardian‘s list of the top 100 novels ever written, was itself a bit intimidating, because it’s the rare novel where I could go into it already knowing there would be layers of meaning beyond the text itself, presenting me with the challenge of reading for plot while also considering how much time to spend deciphering the metaphors and allusions throughout the book. Fortunately, it’s a better read than Camus’ The Stranger, a hallmark of existentialist literature that stands at an imperturbable remove from its protagonist, although I won’t pretend I truly understood everything Camus was trying to express in this text.

Set in Oran, in what is now Algeria but at the time was still a French colony, The Plague follows an outbreak of bubonic plague in the city through about a half-dozen characters, primarily Dr. Rieux, who becomes the leader of the efforts to treat and slow the progress of the epidemic despite a lack of medicines and unhelpful authorities. Bubonic plague, the best-known disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, had no effective treatment at the time that Camus wrote the novel, so characters who fall ill expect and are expected to die, making the response from Dr. Rieux and the other central characters more about management and quarantine rather than cure.

Camus tracks the actions and emotional responses of those half-dozen characters as the plague appears, waxes, peaks, and wanes, with nearly everyone suffering some sort of loss as the novel progresses. Rieux has sent his wife, ill with some other ailment, out of town to a sanatorium as the novel opens, so she’s away during the plague but he has no contact with her. Rambert, a French journalist who was scheduled to leave Oran but who is trapped by the quarantine, speaks of his desire to return to his wife in Paris, even plotting escapes around the guards, but eventually choosing to stay because he feels some responsibility to help. The plague affects everyone, even those who don’t lose family members to the disease, as it first alters the rhythm of the town’s life – Camus writes of the movie theaters running the same films, then exchanging films with other theaters, just to retain some semblance of normal life – and eventually leads to shortages.

There are some strange omissions in the novel, as the major characters are all French men – the women who appear are all minor characters, and I’m not sure there’s even a single named Arab character in the book. Whether Camus intended this, it is a book of othering – his characters set themselves apart from the Algerians in Oran, but are themselves the others, the minority ruling class in a country that would begin a violent revolution for independence seven years after The Plague‘s publication.

Most critical analyses I’ve seen of The Plague describe it as an allegory for the Nazi occupation of France and the intermittent, nearly futile resistance offered by some French civilians against their occupiers and the collaborators in the Vichy puppet government. Camus’ protagonists know they are likely doomed to fail, and even success will be defined by forces outside of their control. I thought the disease worked better as a metaphor for life itself, especially as defined by Camus’ atheist/existentialist worldview: If life and death are largely random, both in the sense of unpredictable as well as without philosophical meaning, then how should we react? What moral codes dictate our actions? Is there value in finding external meanings, as the priest Paneloux – who argues that the death of a child due to plague must be right, because if it occurred, then it means God willed it, in a sort of ne plus ultra form of the unitary executive theory – does right up to his own death? If not, how do we give meaning to our lives when they are finite and may be cut short without warning?

If that was Camus’ intention, he gives us several possible answers, but none is as powerful as Rieux, who seems to sacrifice the most in the novel, but whose only gain is intangible and fleeting, the boost we get from helping others. In a time today when so many people still celebrate materialism or aspire to its excesses, and where we live as if the probability of a catastrophe like The Plague is almost nil, that message feels as relevant as it might have seventy-two years ago in the Holocaust’s wake.

Next up: Bianca Bosker’s Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste, recommended by a close friend of mine who used to work in a restaurant mentioned in the book.