One can appreciate Albert Camus for the sheer brilliance with which he explores the human condition. His ability to throw us into the pitfalls of human vulnerability to catapult us from the trenches of utter despair into the beauty that transcends it is nothing short of remarkable. Camus navigates the complex terrain of human thought with the ease of a skilled cartographer drawing off a well-preserved blueprint. His 1947 novel, The Plague, has an unanticipated but monumental relevance in today’s world that is coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, scathed and weary but hopeful.

The Plague is a somber tale of ills that has fallen on the godforsaken town of Oran, ravaged by a deadly pestilence. It was where undeserving people died by the heaps in the city that dug communal graves to decompose the bodies chemically. With the stench of death and disease quickly filling the ambient air, Oran becomes a town quarantined from the rest of the world with nothing but its own desolation to befriend. This is where Camus juxtaposes this dark backdrop with the light in its central characters who breathe fresh air into this admittedly sordid tale: Dr. Bernard Riuex, Jean Tarrou, Raymond Rambert, and Joseph Grand. With hopes, dreams, insecurities, ambitions, and sensibilities of their own, they remind us of the very human fight to live and to be useful in an environment not conducive so.

Camus describes a simpler time in Oran before the pestilence took hold and takes us to early 20th century France where the subjects of the town took pleasures in simple things like sea-bathing, going to picture houses, frequenting taverns, dancing, indulging in wine and bread, and making love. In a world like ours, which is often consumed by technological dependencies that demand and exploit our limited time and attention, where the very act of slow, carefree, unrecorded, and hence unwatched pass-times seem rare, Camus’ descriptions of distraction-free leisure seem particularly romantic and almost aspirational.

A certain kind of stoicism tends to underpin the personality of his central protagonist Dr. Bernard Rieux. The ability to look at the world and its on-goings with steadfast objectivity that doesn’t waver in the face of life’s trials and tribulations is often the defining characteristic of Camus’ protagonists*. Dr. Rieux is a kind, thoughtful and industrious doctor who cares for his patients through the grueling pandemic, often putting his own physical and emotional needs on hold. However, what weighs on the doctor is not only the pandemic’s blazing speed that was infecting more people than the overwhelmed healthcare system could handle, but also a very sick wife who he has admitted to a sanitarium outside of Oran.

Together with journalist-turned-healthcare worker Jean Tarrou, Rieux assembles a team of dedicated men to help with the medical and administrative duties to track the trajectory of the pandemic. Despite his withdrawn and somewhat emotionally detached nature, Rieux finally finds a friend in the journalist who shares the doctor’s work ethic but is more philosophical and outwardly ponderous about life. One of the most sobering moments in the book is when after visiting a patient on the outskirts of town one night, Rieux and Tarrou go for a swim in the ocean, momentarily forget the carnage caused by the plague on shore, and bask in the gentle waves of the warm, moonlit sea and each others company. Later, we find that the epidemic also claims Tarrou as its victim and the doctor to be stripped of the only companion he had; his pain is only exacerbated upon finding out his wife at the sanitarium had also died due to complications.

Despite the theme of love and parted lovers being central to the book, Rieux never commiserates with fellow health workers in his team about his loneliness. However, Rambert, a journalist stuck in Oran after its gates closed to the outside world to contain the disease, is on the opposite side of the spectrum. He couldn’t stop obsessing about being apart from his beloved wife, who he had left behind in Paris. He makes a few unsuccessful attempts to escape the city by evading border patrol gates to return to her but is thoroughly distressed when his efforts are in vain. Eventually, inspired by the gusto shown by Rieux and Tarrou to combat the pandemic, Rambert puts his dream of returning to his beloved on hold and joins the team of health workers to serve in the fight against the disease.

This summary is not complete without mentioning the eccentric character of Grand. This man piqued my interest the most, for he is a man of very few words, who struggles to articulate the most basic of thoughts and speak them confidently, but oddly enough, wants to be a writer. After laboring on the same sentence for months, picking out each adjective as carefully and as precisely as possible to make the perfect sentence to start what would undoubtedly be his magnum opus, Grand decides to do away with all the adjectives in the sentence and start with something completely different. Grand’s decision to start afresh with his book also metaphorically aligns with the changing atmosphere of Oran brought about by the slow but sure dwindling death count and the deliberate return of ordinary life to the city that the pestilence left as stealthily as it had arrived.

These characters speak to us because they are riddled by the same existential strife that is deeply rooted within us, and they lend an interesting life to the chronicle of the plague that had befallen the unassuming town of Oran. I don’t know if I would label Rieux a hero for saving hundreds of lives and keeping his emotional well-being suspended while doggedly fighting to preserve every human that came across the pestilence’s path. On the other hand, I don’t know if Grand is the hero for, despite it all, still having the patience to wait for the elusive words that he desperately hoped would come at the right time, at the right place. Perhaps there doesn’t need to be a hero as much as there need to be regular people that can truly appreciate the banal moments of everyday existence, like getting started on the first paragraph of that book or going swimming in a salty ocean at night with a best friend.

*Meursault from Camus’ 1942 masterpiece, The Stranger, exhibits a similar passionate detachment from the world around him.