This is a plague that you'll want to get!

Well, maybe not literally. But The Plague by Albert Camus is a great book. It was written just after World War II by Camus, and was written as a statement against how the Nazi's oppressed many Europeans during the war. That statement is not said outright in the book, but there are many comments in the book about how the plague was kind of like battling in a war.

This plague occurred in a French-speaking Northern African town in the 1940's. (This never really happened, but the town really does exist.) This was a port town, and shipping was their livelihood. One day, the townspeople noticed that rats started coming out into the streets and dying, but they didn't think much of it, even though the number of dying rats kept increasing.

One day, the rats stopped coming out, and people thought that they were safe. That was, until people started dying of a mysterious illness. Soon, people realized that it was an epidemic, a plague like the one that occurred in the Middle Ages. They all feared for their life, and also didn't want to spread the plague to other towns, so the town shut down- they wouldn't allow travel in or out of the town for ANY reason.

This book mostly involves six man characters- Dr. Rieux, Jean Tarrou, Joseph Grand, Monsieur Cottard, Raymond Rambert, and Father Paneloux. Dr. Rieux was the most involved with the plague, because he treated it. Tarrou was a mysterious visitor to the town; no one knew why he was there, but he eventually started helping the doctor. Grand was an older man who kept a count of the death toll in the town. Cottard liked the plague because he wanted other people to associate with, and when everyone else was miserable like he was, he felt like he fit in. Rambert was a writer from Paris that got trapped in the town when it shut down, and he tried anything and everything (including working with the black market) to escape to see him "wife" (girlfriend), but once he got the chance to escape, he ended up staying. And Father Paneloux gave sermons on how the people's sin brought the plague (and he later died of the plague himself.)

This interesting cast of characters makes the plague seem realistic. People were trapped in the town with nothing to do except wait it out and hope for the best. Many people died of the plague of course, including two of the main characters- Paneloux and Tarrou.

Camus picked the priest to die on purpose as a statement about religion. He was not religious, and he made this clear in the story. None of the other five characters were noticeably religious- they either outright denounced it, or were completely confused about it. I can't say that I agree with his viewpoints on religion, but his point in the book was well explained and thought-provoking.

And, as I said before, this book was a statement against war and oppression. The people in the town were certainly oppressed and shunned by neighboring cities when word of the epidemic broke out. I think that Camus took a great approach in speaking out against war by doing it carefully and in an undercover way.

This is a book that is not for light reading. It really requires thought and asking questions about yourself. It requires you to examine your standpoint on medical technology, religion, war, love, and many other things. I do highly recommend the book. It is well-written (its original version was actually French and has been translated into many languages), and it makes some great points as well as being entertaining.