Rewriting The Plague — in Vancouver
Kevin Chong’s The Plague is another chapter in the rich genre of classics revisited: retelling of Albert Camus’s famous 1947 novel of the same title ( La Peste), with the events updated and set in a near-future Vancouver.
The best known examples of classics revisited have offered new interpretations of their originals from previously marginal points of view. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys expanded on the story of Jane Eyre by making the mad woman in the attic the protagonist. J. M. Coetzee’s Foe took the Robinson Crusoe story and gave it a new author. And more recently, Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation reinterpreted Camus’s L’Étranger from the perspective of the brother of the Arab man that Meursault shot on the beach.
The Plague, a novel which stands up well in this lofty company, begins with a nod in this same direction, diversifying Camus’s cast by introducing a more realistic ethnic mix. The three major characters (the heroic Dr. Rieux, a visiting American author who gets stuck in the city, and a local journalist) are all of partial Asian descent. But Chong’s novel is more of a literary cover version than a radical new telling of the story. It’s also no longer a particularly political or allegorical novel, using the plague (as Camus did) as a metaphor. Such matters as Vancouver’s social divisions stay in the background. Instead what we get is a picture of the
The Plague, by Kevin Chong, Arsenal Pulp Press, 256 pages, $19.95. disease-stricken city as a kind of lab slide of the essential human condition.
The narrative voice is nicely managed throughout, being both distant and intimate in a way that is only explained at the end. Observation and insight on different levels are tightly interwoven, as when a description of how “office buildings glinted in the damp air with the sheen of plastic wrap,” is followed in the next sentence with a remark about how the health crisis has caused the mood at the moribund newspaper office to brighten as the reporters see the opportunity to end their careers on a noble note.
This may make the reporters sound cynical, but The Plague is not a cynical book. It presents death as a great leveller and suffering and loss as universal. But the end of days is also a force that brings people together in new communities and unexpected relationships. The plague reminds us of what we have in common, and with its mass and random death it brings a fresh understanding of life as something fleeting and fragile, but never cheap. Alex Good is a frequent contributor to these pages.