Albert Camus’ The Plague was initially interpreted as an allegory for the cataclysm that had just preceded its publication: the Nazi occupation of France, resistance to which the author had famously contributed. This reading, which Camus was loath to deny, struck many as dubious: Roland Barthes and Simone de Beauvoir, among others, highlighted the danger of suggesting that Nazism was akin to a ‘natural’ phenomenon such as an epidemic, rather than a product of human relations, however aberrant. Some 80 years on, this debate — at least as it pertains to The Plague — will seem outmoded, if only because the novel’s relevance is now grimly literal.

Unsurprisingly, sales of the novel skyrocketed (precise numbers aside, most couldn’t resist describing the rate of increase as ‘exponential’) at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. This was accompanied by a predictable flurry of critical commentary and reflection. Among the strongest was Jacqueline Rose’s 5,000-word panorama in the London Review of Books, which offered a snappy history of the novel’s critical reception, followed by a perceptive mise à jour of her own. Others were truly excitable, prescribing the novel as if it were a kind of pre-vaccine therapeutic; in a later essay in the New Statesman, Samuel Earle provided an elegant rejoinder to these more hyperbolic takes.

To her annoyance no doubt, some have probably suspected that Laura Marris’s new translation of The Plague is itself an attempt on her publisher Knopf’s part to commercially ride the latest COVID wave. In fact, that her excellent new translation has coincided with a global pandemic is pure serendipity. The first English version to appear in the United States in 70 years, Marris’s is a vast improvement on what came before: Stuart Gilbert’s 1948 translation, which has been roundly criticised for its myriad infelicities. Indeed, in a 2011 issue of Translation Review, Peter Carpenter described the rendition as more ‘a paraphrase than a translation’, which omitted entire sentences and even a paragraph.

Reading the novel again, I found it striking just how superior it is when read simply as an account of an epidemic rather than as an allegory for either fascism in particular or evil in general. His early descriptions of denial and disbelief among Oran’s inhabitants, not to mention the authorities’ initial insouciance, are chillingly accurate: epidemics, never mind the plague, are dismissed as horrors of a distant, benighted past; such is the invisibility of the ‘scourge’, most assume it will soon pass, if it’s real at all; the disease is initially described as a ‘disgusting invasion’, something foreign and freakish, which won’t gain a foothold; there quickly emerges that now familiar cleavage between Rieux, the doctor-protagonist, and the city’s bureaucrats, who seem more frightened by the potential for panic than the deadly disease itself. Essentially: ‘it can’t happen to us, not here, not now.’

One of the most compelling aspects of Camus’ writing is how he demonstrates our capacity to tolerate what are sometimes quite extraordinary levels of discomfort and uncertainty. Insofar as these are ineluctable features of life, this is, on the one hand, surely a strength: people manage to ‘go about their business’, scarcely aware that ‘a plague would cancel the future, the travel and conversations’, armed with a reserve of stoicism for which they should be grateful. On the other hand, this forbearance is freighted with self-deception, potentially rendering us blind to reality. Moreover, stoicism can easily degrade into mere resignation.

This framing of human action in terms of trade-offs is everywhere in Camus’ writing, and evinces, perhaps better than anything else, his somewhat conservative temperament. What I mean by this is that he was averse to the very notion of the unalloyed good; like the ambivalent mental reflexes outlined above, the good, as he understood it, tends to be shadowed by the bad, whether we like it or not. Yet for all this attention to trade-offs, he could hardly be accused of relativism, still less a lack of conviction. For Camus, if the good must come with the bad, this doesn’t mean that we should resile from trying to achieve it; far from it. In this respect, his worldview was essentially tragic, much like his attitude towards violence, which he considered ‘both unavoidable and unjustifiable.’ It was also distinctly anti-utopian, something which his champions consider integral to what they see as his fundamental ‘decency.’ For his detractors, on the contrary, his civility and chronic moderation are at best evidence of a kind of philosophical dullness, and at worst a case of him simply wanting to have his cake and eat it.

As a novel, The Plague is at its most acute when articulating the psychological strain that accompanies prolonged isolation. In particular, Camus brilliantly captures how the oranais’ sense of temporality is frighteningly deranged by the epidemic: most ‘compelled themselves never to think of the date of their release, to no longer think of the future.’ The comforts of memory itself were vitiated: ‘the very past they kept revisiting tasted only of regret.’ Most ominous for this reader was the following: ‘frightened but not hopeless, people found the moment had not yet arrived when the plague would appear as the very form of their lives, when they would forget the existence they had once been able to lead.’ Whether we have reached this point with COVID-19 is a question many — myself included — are understandably reluctant to address.

Weaker are those moments when the novel, usually via Rieux, tries to vouchsafe wisdom; Camus the moralist’s aphorisms can sometimes come across as more trite than profound. Yet even here Marris does the important work of vastly improving on her predecessors’ efforts. Perhaps the best example of this is her translation of Rieux’s oft-quoted bromide, ‘the only way to fight the plague is with honesty.’ Gilbert had translated this as ‘decency’, but ‘honesty’ — the original French is honnêteté — is surely more appropriate. For that matter, does ‘decency’ even presuppose ‘honesty’?

It would be unfair to a writer of Camus’ stature to end on such a disparaging note. Indeed, Marris does every justice to a prose style whose chaste lyricism is to be celebrated. Her translation of the section where Rieux contemplates the disjuncture between what the plague coming to town portends and the quotidian reality he continues to observe is a particular highlight. ‘On one side of the pane, the fresh spring sky, and on the other side, that word still resonated in the room: plague.’ ‘On the other side of the pane, the sudden sound of an invisible tram negated cruelty and pain in an instant.’ The transposition of rhythm and alliteration, effects vital to the content being expressed in these phrases, is carried off expertly.

The Plague is built on a durably protean metaphor, one which both assures its relevance and invites quibble: it was at the root of the controversies upon the book’s publication; and today, in our media-saturated world, the metaphor of virality is among the most lazily deployed. Unfortunately for us, metaphor is right now less of a problem than reality.

Luke Warde is a writer and researcher based in London. He completed a doctorate in French at the University of Cambridge, and his writing has appeared in the Irish Times, the Sunday Independent, the Dublin Review of Books and Eurozine.

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