PLAGUE MASS: Finally, a post about The Plague, probably the best book I’ve read this year. This is going to be pretty scattershot.

The first thing I noticed was how suspenseful and well-paced it is. I mean, the plot is right there in the title, so the only surprises can come from pacing and from how Camus works the changes on his novel’s situation. In both areas The Plague excels. This might be an artifact of the translation (I was using Stuart Gilbert’s–don’t know if that’s considered good or not), but the descriptive and lyrical passages seemed especially well-placed. This is just a really, really well-constructed novel.

The different aspects of the plague and the quarantine also included some surprises: the theme of lovers’ exile, for example. This is so perfect and right. A book as Job-like as The Plague should invoke the deeply Christian metaphor of separated lovers. It’s unexpected and poignant and humanist in the best way.

The characterizations are mostly affecting and “real.” I had a thing that is partly a problem of characterization and partly a problem of theology/the book’s existential stance, and I’m not sure which end is larger. On the basic characterization end, I know Christians say the darnedest things, but while I found it easy to accept that a priest would give the Job’s-comforters speech as a sermon, I found it a lot harder to swallow that his sermon would explicitly link Job to Pharaoh. This seemed like pushing things in a way that made it unnecessarily obvious that Fr. Paneloux (like the faithful women in the novel) is being portrayed much more from the “outside” than the other major characters. It made the book seem like it was just avoiding Job, which I think it ultimately isn’t, although my theological/existential angle is that I don’t think the book fully grapples with a) God’s trial and response and b) the fact that it’s in the Bible.

I initially thought that the book also ignored or merely gestured at the related problem, of whether this kind of charitable-heroic atheism saws off the branch it sits on. The Plague is a novel set entirely within the clash between happiness and suffering; there’s no alternative framework, no sense of (for example) good/evil as a possible different way of understanding the world’s obvious self-opposition. Whenever happiness/suffering is the only ethical framework presented, I think of the statue of Comfort erected by the mercy-killers in A Canticle for Leibowitz. It seems obvious to me that if you take suffering as the sole evil and happiness as the sole good you begin to step down the path where the weak are killed because they suffer and they get in the way.

I don’t think The Plague goes into that arena at all. But it does draw out other, more nuanced and emotional problems of the happiness/suffering framework–can you call a man to sacrifice his own happiness to do work that will rarely even “fix” things, but merely provide witness and compassion, suffering-with? And I do think The Plague begins to move into the question of whether it’s possible to sustain a Christianized anthropology–a sense of what’s valuable, heroic, worthy of love and pity rather than contempt, in human lives–without a Christian theology. All this through deeply affecting, memorable portrayals of character and situation, characters full of the unnecessary evasions and corners and histories of real people.

This is the rare novel of ideas where both the novel and the ideas are done right.