Last month’s book was supposed to be The Colour Purple but I have to confess that I have not yet read it, so cannot yet offer a review. I will try to do so in the next week. My excuse is that I was overcome by the coronavirus – not infected for those of you who might be concerned; rather obsessed by how the virus has been spreading and how countries and governments have been reacting to it. So I ended up reading a bunch of books about epidemics and plagues rather than the one I should have been reading. But for those of you who would like a different perspective on global pandemics some of these books might be quite useful, so I thought I’d briefly write them up.
What is most interesting in all the books discussed below is not so much the plagues themselves as how humanity reacts to them. Many of the themes that dominate these works are already apparent in how we are dealing with coronavirus because they deal in eternal human characteristics. From incompetent or blundering leaders to fraudsters and spivs who try to use the situation to exploit the vulnerable – from heavy handed policing to people snitching on their neighbours – it has all been seen before. And so these books might offer you a clue as to how society will evolve in the coming weeks if we come anywhere close to the worse-case scenarios.
The first and oldest book is Daniel Defoe’s ‘A Journal of the Plague Year’. Published in 1722 this is written as a first-hand account of the ‘Great Plague of London’ which occurred in 1665, the year before the Great Fire. A largely factual account of one of the greatest tragedies ever to befall London (it seems to me much worse than The Blitz), it spares no detail in its descriptions of the sufferings of the London poor.
Defoe castigates the many villains who added to the misery of the people. The city was awash with fraudsters offering quack-remedies that prised the last pennies from the fingers of the poor and wretched. Miserable men, supposedly, of god denounced the suffering for bringing retribution on their heads in payment for their sins. Gravediggers and neighbours stripped the clothes and jewellery from the dead. Meanwhile those with money and resources fled the city, taking the plague with them.
But Defoe is also at pains to emphasise the heroic work of both the authorities and the people in facing up to the catastrophe. Simply digging enough graves to bury the dead was a titanic achievement. Some measures were terribly cruel but necessary – houses with known cases of ‘distemper’ as it was sometimes known were shut up with the residents inside and guards on the doors. In many cases of course this was a death sentence even if it benefitted the larger population. Compare the suffering of your ancestors with the inconvenience you are currently experiencing as you sit comfortably on your sofa watching Netflix!
The most celebrated of all novels about pandemics is Albert Camus’ ‘The Plague’ (La Peste in the French original). Set in French Algeria in the early 1940’s, the story is an allegory on Nazism but, more than that, it is a meditation on mankind confronting existential threats. As in Defoe, Camus considers the range of human reactions from those stoically doing their duty to others who exploit the situation to make money by smuggling, and those who simply want to run away.
One of the most interesting characters in the novel is Father Paneloux, the Jesuit priest. At first he reacts like the clergymen in Defoe and denounces his congregation for bringing the plague on them by their wickedness. But his own faith is sorely tested by the pestilence, notably when he has to watch an innocent child die of the plague.
Another fascinating character is Jean Tarrou whose father was a prosecuting attorney in the days when France still had the death penalty. Tarrou was haunted by the day that he accompanied his father to court and watched him demand ‘the head’ of the accused man – ‘the head’ being literal rather than metaphorical as the man was subsequently guillotined. Camus puts some of the most memorable words in defense of human compassion in Tarrou’s mouth. Disgusted by the death of this wretched convict in the name of justice, Tarrou outlines his philosophy to the ‘hero’ of the novel, Doctor Bernard Rieux, as follows:
“All I can say is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims – and as far as possible one must refuse to be on the side of the pestilence”.
Another French novel which unfolds during a pandemic is ‘The Horseman on the Roof’ by Jean Giono. This is set in 1832 in Provence which was one of the areas worst hit by the cholera pandemic of 1826-37. Like Camus, Giono uses the pandemic as a metaphor – he views fear of the pandemic as worse than the pandemic itself. Thus the brave hero, the hussar Angelo, appears to be immune because he is unafraid…but I will gave more to say about this when I have finished the book.
There are countless dystopian films and books set in a future ravaged by plague and disease. I tried a couple of these as an antidote to the novels already discussed which were based on real events in the past. The first of these was ‘Station Eleven’ by Emily St. John Mandel. Set in a near-future in which 99% of the human race has been wiped out by a devastating flu epidemic, the novel takes a look at the lot of the survivors. With so few people left there in no way to maintain any of the basic processes which kept the modern world working. Gradually everything that represented civilisation comes to a stop. No more prepared food, no mobile phone network, no petrol, no electricity, no heating, no air-conditioning. This is a future as envisaged by Extinction Rebellion!
Seriously, although rather uneven and with too many flashbacks to the pre-pandemic world, this novel generates some genuine queasiness about what it would be like to find that everything that we all take for granted suddenly stopped functioning. Naturally there are the usual armed bands wandering everywhere as what is left of society collapses into an ‘every man for himself’ nightmare. But it is the adjustment to a world in which a flick of a switch no longer produces light that gives most pause for thought.
Finally I realised if I were ever going to read a Stephen King story it was now or never. So I started with his monstrous (in size 1300 pages!) ‘The Stand’. Again set in the present or near-future this tells of a humanity largely wiped out by the escape of a virus from a US army lab…but as I still have a thousand pages to go I’ll say more about this one another time.
What all of these books have in common is a catastrophe that is infinitely worse than the epidemic we are currently enduring. Read one of the books as an antidote for feeling sorry for yourself.
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