This sense of self-sacrifice and fraternity is held up by Camus to show the very best of mankind. Many citizens put themselves forward to perform dangerous, unenviable tasks for the common good such as working in hospitals and at burial sites. This uncanniness provides comfort for some readers whilst unsettling others.Īs the wave of the plague washes over and engulfs the city, the citizens resolve that their best form of defence, both physically against the virus, and spiritually to preserve their sanity, is solidarity. “It is impossible it should be the plague, everyone knows it has vanished from the West,” said one character near the start of the book. We will all see the initial complacency and denialism of the citizens as eerily similar to, if not our own reactions to first reading about coronavirus, then certainly to those of some friends and family. Within a few weeks, an emergency and city-wide lockdown is called as the number of new cases of this disease increases more quickly than the city officials can even register.Įvery reader will recognise the uncanny similarities between the reactions of the people of Oran and ourselves. One day the rats of the city mysteriously die in their droves, the next the first person in the city reports they are bedbound with a strange condition that causes boils to erupt all over their skin.

Set in Oran, a city on the coast of Algeria, in the 1940s, it tells of a fictional plague that sweeps through the population at astonishing speed. We didn’t predict coronavirus or the lockdown, but when they came to pass, it seems many of us sought comfort in a book containing clear parallels to our current situation: The Plague, a French novel written in 1947 by Albert Camus.Īs we struggled to comprehend the pandemic confining us to our homes, The Plague provided us with a useful tale. Sales of La Peste ( The Plague in English) rocketed up by 1000% in the UK during the first few weeks of lockdown.

The pest albert camus