The Plague by Albert Camus

In this respect our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences.  A pestilence isn't a thing made to man's measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pas away.  But it doesn't always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they haven't taken their precautions.  Our townsfolk were not more to blame than others; they forgot to be modest, that was all, and thought that everything still was possible for them; which presupposed that pestilences were impossible.  They went on doing business, arranged for journeys, and formed views.  How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views.  They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.

Why did I do this to myself?  If I were being self-congratulatory, I might say that I read The Plague during a global pandemic because I have decided to face facts, and look the enemy in the eye.  But that's not true; I've stopped looking at Twitter because I can't take the news at the moment.  Maybe there's something pacifying about reading about a fictional plague, one that unfolds over the pace of 200 pages, and doesn't have to be lived through at the agonizing rate of a day at a time.  Maybe it's just a kind of grim joke I decided to play on myself.

In Camus' novel, the place is Oran, a French Algerian port, and the plague is the plague.  It begins, as the plague does, with rats: first a couple of rats dying in the streets, then dozens, then hundreds, then thousands.  The rats unleash the bubonic plague on the people of Oran, in isolated instances at first, and then, again, by dozens, hundreds, thousands.  Soon Oran finds itself shut off from the outside world as plague rampages through it, separating lovers, family, and incarcerating those inside.

Oran is not the world.  That's the first big difference between The Plague and the coronavirus; there's no sense at the moment that other places have it better, and if you could just be elsewhere, everything would be all right.  But the sense of exile, of being cut off, doesn't that describe what we're all going through with extreme social distancing?  Thank goodness we have more, these days, than telegrams.  In a hundred other little ways, The Plague is spot-on about the dynamics of the pandemic, from the bureaucratic slowness and ineptitude which is formed by an unwillingness to admit the truth:

Then, after sweeping the other members of the committee with a friendly glance, he said that he knew quite well it was plague and, needless to say, he also knew that, were this to be officially admitted, the authorities would be compelled to take very drastic steps.  This was, of course, the explanation of his colleagues' reluctance to face the facts and, if it would ease their minds, he was quite prepared to say it wasn't plague.

To the enervating mystery of when things will get back to normal:

It is noteworthy that our townspeople very quickly desisted, even in public, from a habit one might have expected them to form--that of trying to figure out the probable duration of their exile.  The reason was this: when the most pessimistic had fixed it at, say, six months; when they had drunk in advance the dregs of bitterness of those six black months, and painfully screwed up their courage to the sticking-place, straining all their remaining energy to endure valiantly the long ordeal of all those weeks and days--when they had done this, some friend they met, an article in a newspaper, a vague suspicion, or a flash of foresight would suggest that, after all, there was no reason why the epidemic shouldn't last more than six months; why not a year, or even more?

Even to the way an epidemic exacerbates the injustice of society and falls hardest on those like prisoners:

"I should tell you, however, that they're thinking of using the prisoners in the jails for what we call the 'heavy work.'"

"I'd rather free men were employed." 

"So would I.  But might I ask why you feel like that?" 

"I loathe men's being condemned to death."

But I'll say this: the focus of The Plague is not really on the dying or the beleaguered, but on a small group of people, led by Dr. Bernard Rieux, who risk their lives to help Oran through the plague.  Rieux tells those who volunteer with him that they stand a one in three chance of surviving, if they assist in what are called "sanitary squads," but each of them comes to realize the work as a kind of human duty.  You can't read about Rieux without thinking about the thousands of doctors, nurses, and yes, grocery store workers who are putting their lives at risk every day to combat the coronavirus.  In the end, The Plague is a very human and humane book; it sees self-sacrifice and community as the heart of what is best about people.  As one of Rieux's friends and associates, Tarrou, says, "What's natural is the microbe.  All the rest--health, integrity, purity (if you like)--is a product of the human will, of a vigilance that must never falter."

Late in the book, the inept magistrate M. Othon, who spends weeks in a horrid isolation camp, decides upon his release to return there in order to help it run.  Pestilence, Camus says, offers the opportunity for human beings to become better and wiser, if we'll take it.  Ultimately, the lesson of the novel is that "there are more things to admire in men than despise."  Maybe I'm grasping at any kind of straw, but I closed the novel with at least a little bit of that kind of hope.