La Peste (The Plague) by Albert Camus

I first read this book in French at school, over forty years ago. It was recently selected as a book to read by my local book club so I read it again - in English!

At school I remember us making much of it as an allegory of German occupation of Paris during the Second World War and, indeed, this was ever more the case when I re-read it. Of course the current pandemic lends the story a contemporary angle with knowing and recognizable human behavours such as the desire to escape as well as the desire to stay and help. There is also the self-satisfying human desire to somehow turn the greatest of evils to financial benefit, with the bribery and corruption of guards and smuggling activities prevalent. In the recent lockdowns we have seen big business grapple with how to make themselves 'essential' when they really aren't and at the same time as small, independent shops having to close.

Camus' writing really speeds us along in this tale but it is the sense of the absurd that I was really taken with (and which had totally escaped our younger minds (and possibly that of our French teacher at the time). All buildings are used for plague-related relief activities, apart from municipal buildings that are deemed essential for committee meetings; a man who knows the time of day by how many dried peas he has passed from one pan to the other... these, for me, are delicious and very close to my own view of a society which does not make sense when defined by institutions, only by individual experience.

I loved the book, its accessible but beautiful writing - including a fair degree of pathos - and characters who did what they could in the face of an overwhelming enemy.

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