The Plague [electronic resource]

Chong, Kevin2018

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Summary

A vivid and politically charged novel that takes a simple yet intriguing premise: retelling Albert Camus’ 1948 novel of the same name, which tells the quietly horrifying story of a plague that visits upon the French Algerian city of Oran. Chong recasts the book in contemporary Vancouver on the west coast of North America – a typical cosmopolitan urban center that is also home to many different cultures, but also one that is marked by striking differences in class. By setting The Plague in our contemporary Trump age of strident nationalism and racism, Chong explores the political ramifications of a plague that also underscores the irrational and hysterical fear of the “other.” At the same time, it offers glimpses of hope and resilience against the pestilence of our modern times. Camus’ novel remains relevant, particularly in our contemporary age. To wit, a 2017 article from The Economist entitled “How ‘The Plague’ Infects the Modern Political Mood”:https://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2017/04/troubled-times In Kevin Chong’s own words: “The idea for the book came to me in late fall 2016. Around the time of Halloween, firecrackers were going off, and I fancifully thought of the city as being under siege. Then a week later the US election came and depressed everyone I knew. There was despair on both sides of the border. At the same time I recognized that not everyone was equally affected. Some groups were more immediately threatened than others. There were also people who were pleased by the turn of events. “Around that time, my wife was moving books around the house. As a result, a copy of Camus’ The Plague was lying out in the open and caught my eye. I started re-reading it again. It’s one of those books made for your university years: it not only asks big questions about morality and love and despair but has characters unabashedly discussing them. “I loved the book again. I loved its descriptions of Algeria and its depictions of suffering. It also read from a bygone world. I hadn’t noticed in my first reading that all the characters were male. It was also a book set in Algeria that made no reference to the Arab or Berber peoples. “I was also thinking of dystopian/post-apocalyptic fiction, and how the original Plague relates to that. I feel like this book presents an apocalyptic scenario but explores how people react when separated from loved ones and confronted with illness. As in the original, it's about how people choose to behave selflessly in the absence of God or even the likelihood of a positive outcome. “Part of updating this novel went beyond changing names and locations was to imagine what infectious disease and quarantine would mean in our contemporary age. We now are aware that any misfortune affects a population asymmetrically: the poor and marginalized suffer more. Then there's the idea that the suffering depicted in this story would have historical antecedents: the Indigenous people who died from smallpox and tuberculosis after contact with European settlers; people who have died from the AIDS epidemic; and those who have been allowed to die with minimal intervention from synthetic opioids. All of these ‘plagues’ have been continually overlooked and forgotten. I kept asking myself, what would it take for people not to ignore an epidemic? For me, it boiled down to losing freedom of mobility.”