At the start of the restrictions on "social distance" intended to prevent or at least slow the spread of the corona virus, I recommended some books to read during quarantine and social isolation, and this was one of them. And since it's about 60 years since I read it, I thought I ought to take my own advice and read it again.

When I first read it as a teenager various people told me that though it was ostensibly a story about an outbreak of bubonic plague in the city of Oran in Algeria, then a French colony, which led to the whole city being placed under quarantine, it was really a kind of allegory of the Nazi plague that had devastated Europe a few years before it was published. I didn't really see it at the time. Sometimes a story is just a story, and that is what I thought this one was.

But now I am older I have read many more books and many more literary genres and have greater knowledge of history and experience of life, so perhaps I would see the allegory that had escaped me before. But I have to confess that I didn't. I thought it no more an allegory than [b:The Lord of the Rings|34|The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, #1)|J.R.R. Tolkien|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1298411339l/34.SX50.jpg|3204327] is an allegory.

Yes, a lifetime of experience enabled me to see things that I did not see before, so I was looking through different eyes.

One of the things I saw for the first time was that at the beginning of the book a journalist, who is trapped in the city by the quarantine, had come to write about the conditions under which the Arab population of the city were living, and that was practically the last mention of the Arab population at all. We are told nothing, absolutely nothing, about how the plague affected them. But when the Nazi plague came to France, the Jews did not cease to exist. I am sure many of them would have wished to be as invisible during the Nazi occupation as the Arabs are in Camus's book.

Camus himself was trapped in Nazi-occupied France, and when he writes of the plague as "exile", he writes from real experience. It makes little difference whether the exile is caused by political conditions, war or disease, the effects are the same. And it is not just those whose homes are outside and who are trapped in the plague-ridden city who are exiles; those who have homes in the city experience exile too, and exile, in Camus's view, is essentially separation from people you love and who love you.

Between 1966 and 1972 I experienced something like such exile four times, and twice in one year, after which I read [b:The Anatomy of Exile|2085708|The Anatomy of Exile A Semantic and Historical Study|Paul Tabori|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1411952570l/2085708.SX50.jpg|2090992] to help me to interpret the experience, and coming to [b:The Plague|11989|The Plague|Albert Camus|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1503362434l/11989.SY75.jpg|2058116] with some experience of exile enables me to see a bit more of what Camus is getting at.

At some points I thought I might give it five stars on GoodReads instead of my original four, but a couple of things put me off. One is the invisibility of the Arab population mentioned earlier. The second is a small boy, the son of a rather strict magistrate, who is taken ill. His name is Philippe, but later his father refers to him as Jacques. Not remembering the names of the people you love doesn't seem to be a good thing in a book about love and exile.