Community of Death

THE PLAGUE (278 pp.)--Albert Camus --Knopf ($3).

The citizens of Oran found it something of a nuisance that their streets should be overrun with thousands of dying rats. "From basements, cellars and sewers they emerged in long wavering files into the light of day, swayed helplessly, then did a sort of pirouette and fell dead at the feet of the horrified onlookers."

Then, one day, the trek from the sewers ceased, and everyone felt absurdly lighthearted. Everyone, that is, but Dr. Bernard Rieux, leading character of Albert Camus' latest novel. A strange fever had attacked his concierge. The old man had pains in his neck, armpits and groin; sudden swellings had arisen over his body. He died in an ambulance, choking, as Dr. Rieux watched helplessly.

Soon other cases developed, all with the same symptoms, all ending in rapid death. Dr. Rieux realized the truth: the rats had left because the plague had come --bubonic plague.

Attack. At first, the city hardly knew what to make of it. The town was quarantined and its 200,000 residents were left, in fright and helplessness, to face death together. Despite years of medical service, Dr. Rieux had never learned to watch death with tranquillity. He thought of previous plagues: "Athens, a charnel house reeking to heaven and deserted even by the birds . . . the Constantinople lazar-house, where the patients were hauled up from their beds with hooks . . ." With these, the victims of Oran were now united in a community of death.

Rambert, a journalist, who had recently arrived in Oran and yearned to return to his mistress in Paris, tried his best to bribe sentries to let him escape. The common affliction meant nothing to him.

Cottard, a black-marketeer wanted by the police, was gleeful. So long as the police were kept busy by the plague, he was not likely to be bothered by them.

Grand, a humble little clerk, continued his lifelong effort to compose the perfect opening sentence of a novel. Jean Tarrou, a disenchanted revolutionist, continued to observe the world with detached skepticism? What did the plague mean to him? And Father Paneloux thundered that God "loosed on you this visitation; as He has visited all the cities that offended against Him since the dawn of history."

Resistance. The city was deathly still, and as groans came from behind the walls of death, life in Oran reached the extreme limits of uncertainty. On the surface, many things continued as before: the movie houses were packed, even though the same films were shown night after night; the opera house was filled with citizens in evening clothes trying to appear nonchalant--until the leading singer collapsed on the stage. People tried to stop thinking: to recall the past only brought regrets for lives that might have been lived differently; to hope for the future only invited despair.

But precisely when things seemed worst, people began to pull themselves together. Tarrou organized a group of volunteers to combat the plague. Rambert, on the eve of his escape, chose to remain and fight; he had learned that in such times "it may be shameful to be happy by oneself." Grand abandoned his perfect sentence and Father Paneloux his religious fatalism. It was not a question of heroism; people hardly had enough freedom of choice to be heroic. They simply decided to do what they could, even if their resistance was absurd. And perhaps, suggests Camus, to continue upholding one's human obligations when there seems the least possibility of fulfilling them is, if not heroism, the best men can do.

Parable. This is the story of Albert Camus' The Plague, written in a muted, undramatic style, quite in the way a sensitive but unliterary doctor might set down his recollections. When first published in Paris in 1947, it created a sensation; it was immediately understood as a parable of the French underground (Camus was editor of Combat, a leading French underground paper).

Readers may dispute its occasional statements of murky philosophy, especially its elements of unconditional pacifism, but few are likely to deny that The Plague is one of the few genuinely important works of art to come out of Europe since the war's end. It makes most recent American war novels seem tinny and thin by comparison.

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