Father Figures

Three-quarters of the way through the novel I’ve always thought is Camus’ finest, its two main protagonists go for a swim after dark in the waters beyond the harbour of their coastal city, which is in the grip of bubonic plague. The city is Oran, in north-west Algeria; the date is sometime in the 1940s. The plague, which gives the novel its name, has sealed Oran off from the outside world. The Mediterranean water into which the men plunge breathes like a fur-covered animal, Camus tells us. In it is stored the warmth of the day just ended. The two men, Dr Bernard Rieux and Jean Tarrou, both prominent in the fight against the plague, are knowingly breaking the curfew by slipping past the guards they themselves have helped set up, and heading for the sea. They’re not acting out of defiance of the authorities, but to enjoy for a moment what it is they are trying to re-establish: moral and physical well-being. What, they ask as they swim alongside each other under the stars, is the point of fighting for something that can’t be enjoyed?

Whenever I think of The Plague (1947), it’s this swim that first comes to mind. It’s a high point in the novel, the only moment of escape from the living entombment inside Oran. Rieux and Tarrou are powerful literary creations, fully fleshed out, complex. They’re no saints, but two individuals doing their best to live by what Abraham Lincoln called ‘the better angels of our nature’. And it’s because of well-rounded characterization – of good people such as Rieux and Tarrou but also of others who can’t live by Lincoln’s angels, or choose not to – that I’ve always found The Plague the most rewarding of Camus’ novels, the most human and the most forgiving. I first encountered it at school. It was a set text on my French A-level syllabus. By way of preparation, our teacher – my own father, as it happened – introduced us first to Camus the man of ideas. As my father presented them, these ideas boiled down to one big one, the concept of the Absurd. To understand it was uphill work, for teacher and pupils alike. For assistance, we were pointed to two of Camus’ works of non-fiction, The Rebel and The Myth of Sisyphus. I gave both a go, but still didn’t understand. The next suggestion was Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea, particularly the passage in which the protagonist Roquentin feels physically sick when the roots of a tree he’s contemplating lose their identity and start to swim before his eyes in a viscous and disgusting mess; they’re no longer part of the tree. In fact, tree no longer makes sense; the word doesn’t tidy up the collection of roots, trunk, branches and leaves that’s making Roquentin feel so giddy. It was those visceral pages of Nausea that finally let me grasp what Camus, via my father, wanted to get into our heads, that the Absurd was about a bad relationship, like that of Roquentin with the tree, a relationship founded on a sickening irony: we humans need the world but the world doesn’t need us. But – here was the uplifting next step in Camus’ argument – the consequence shouldn’t be despair. The Absurd didn’t have to mean nihilism. The opposite in fact, because it’s our human duty to rebel against it as if it could be overcome. And what that paradox entailed was set out nowhere more eloquently, I thought, than in Camus’ plague-ridden Oran, where among the dedicated fighters of the Absurd the one who stood out was the medical doctor Bernard Rieux. In none of the books I was studying had I encountered a figure so memorable for being so unassuming, quiet and stoical. He was the polar opposite of Meursault, the main protagonist in Camus’ first and most famous novel, which my father had also suggested we read. The Outsider seemed to me then, and still does, just a clever game of two halves that don’t fit together. Literally overnight, Meursault goes from inarticulate sensualist to eloquent philosopher. The Outsider, as I see it, is an awkward roman à thèse. So is The Plague – minus the awkwardness. It expands its ideas in the most unforced way. They emerge naturally from the action, as in a good play (which, in its five-part structure, The Plague resembles, reminding us that one of Camus’ great loves was the theatre). That action and the reaction of the Oranais are shaped by the twists and turns of an unprecedented but credible medical emergency. The situation is this. It’s April 1940-something in the unremarkable coastal city of Oran, which is inhabited by unremarkable people. Camus wants us to know that these people are neither particularly virtuous nor especially contemptible. They’ve done nothing either to deserve what is about to descend on them or to be spared it. One ordinary day, a dead rat is found on a landing in a block of flats; then more turn up around the city. Bubonic plague has arrived, and a state of emergency is declared. The city is sealed off. No one is allowed to leave, including anyone just passing through, such as the Parisian journalist Rambert; and no one is allowed to enter, including Oranais temporarily out of town, such as Rieux’s young wife, who’s gone for treatment to a mountain sanatorium. The plague claims its first human victim, then a few more, after which deaths multiply until they’re so regular they seem almost normal. The authorities struggle to contain the epidemic. Prophylactic measures are tried, including a new serum. Nothing works. Religion has no answers either. The scholarly priest Father Paneloux tells his congregation that they’ve deserved the plague; God is punishing them for their spiritual laziness. But Paneloux begins to question God’s justice and to struggle with his faith; when the plague comes to claim him, he dies clinging to his beliefs and still refusing allmedical attention. The epidemic peaks in August, striking busily and randomly. Innocent young children die while unsavoury adults are spared. And then, as inexplicably as it had arrived, the plague starts to decline in the autumn, and by late January, ten months after it began, it’s over. Normal life in Oran quickly resumes, but the blunt fact no one must forget is that the plague can and will descend again, anywhere, at any time. The bacillus never dies. The story of Oran’s plague year works not just as a gripping novel but also as a twofold allegory. One, of course, is of the Absurd. Oran stands for our world, in which suffering and death are indiscriminate and unjust. We could easily fall into despair, as indeed some Oranais do, notably a failed suicide called Cottard. But, Camus tells us, we can get beyond the loneliness of despair once we realize that everyone is in the same boat. Solitaire to solidaire, to use Camus’ own words; from solitude to society. And no section of society fights despair more resolutely than doctors, people such as Rieux, who accept the reality of death while acting as though it can be prevented. The way Camus portrays Rieux makes him the person whom Oranais – the reader too, perhaps – can most look up to. As the novel progresses, he acquires the authority which the figure I always see as his true opposite, Father Paneloux, steadily loses. But I’ve always had a more personal reason to value The Plague. Its other allegory – the invasion of France by Nazi Germany – connects directly with my own family’s experience. My French mother’s family had to endure the Occupation, some of them in their native Auvergne, others in Le Havre, most in Toulouse. So I can’t help looking for parallels between them and characters in Camus’ novel. My mother, for example, who had a temporary job in Bradford, couldn’t go back to France, just as Rieux’s wife can’t return to Oran. My aunt in Toulouse, guiding Jewish friends, and once a British airman, to safe houses, reminds me of Rieux’s and Tarrou’s resistance to the plague; as does my grandmother, who stood up to armed men hunting a young woman they thought was inside her house – as indeed she was. As far as I know, we had no equivalents of Cottard, the black- marketeer. I like to think that in the main my French great-aunts and great-uncles and second cousins most resembled the clerk of Oran’s health authority, the person Camus calls the plague’s real hero, an ordinary but indomitable man who – note the significance – has been given the surname of Grand. Imagine my shock, my parents’ dismay, on hearing of Camus’ death in a road accident. Around dawn on Monday, 4 January 1960 he was killed when the car in which he was being driven from Provence to Paris crashed near the Forest of Fontainebleau. He was only 46. The manner of his death had all the irony of the Absurd. He’d planned to make the overnight journey to Paris by train but was persuaded at the last moment to switch to a car. He had little time for cars, especially flashy ones such as the Facel Vega in which he met his end. People of genuine distinction, he’d told its owner, his friend and publisher Michel Gallimard, drove anonymous black Citroëns. However, the ultimate, absurd insult was to dispatch a person of such greatness so brutally, unceremoniously and in such haste. But there was something else too, and it concerned my father. Three weeks earlier, he’d given my sixth form his final class on The Plague. Now, mere hours after Camus’ death, he returned home from his very first day in his new job stunned by the realization that he should never have left teaching. For a while, the consequences of that departure would be disastrous. A fateful Monday indeed.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 59 © Martin Sorrell 2018