My friend and classmate from primary school all the way to university, Kenneth Micheu, recently reminded me of one of our set books in high school, The Plague, by Albert Camus, the French-Algerian Nobel Prize winning writer and philosopher. The novel tells the story of a plague sweeping the French-Algerian city of Oran. It asks a number of questions relating to the nature of destiny and the human condition.
The characters in the book, ranging from doctors to vacationers and fugitives, all help to show the effects that the plague has on human behaviour. The novel is believed to have been based on the cholera epidemic that killed a large percentage of Oran’s population in 1849 following the French colonisation, but the events are placed in the 1940s. There are many uncanny similarities in the book with the events surrounding today’s coronavirus pandemic.
