AUTHOR REBOOTS, REIMAGINES A CLASSIC
Inspired by Camus novel, nightmare tale is set in Vancouver’s ‘near future’
The nightmare begins when the rats boil up out of the sewers and the citizens of the city begin to die horribly, in blood and anguish.
As they do, buboes — the painful black swellings that give bubonic plague its name — begin to appear. Some of the city residents respond with opportunism, eager black marketeers in a time of Black Plague. Others rise to the occasion with acts of radical kindness and decency, and all are transformed.
But are we seeing this unfold in a sun-blasted Oran in postwar Algeria or under the damp and overcast of a future Vancouver? A new novel from local author Kevin Chong poses just that question in his new book inspired by the Albert Camus classic.
Everywhere you look these days, movies and TV shows are being re-made. But the passion for re-makes is to be seen in more serious literature as well. Hogarth Press is currently publishing retellings of Shakespeare’s stories. For example, Margaret Atwood has “covered” The Tempest as Hagseed, and Jeanette Winterson covers The Winter’s Tale as The Gap in Time.
Vancouver’s Kevin Chong takes on a task almost as daunting as the Hogarth authors’ challenge. In his new novel The Plague, Chong has boldly moved the plot and many of the characters from Camus’ iconic mid-20th-century novel of the same name to Vancouver “in the near future.”
It is a successful experiment in storytelling and an homage to one of the 20th century’s major novels.
I am not sure if budding young intellectuals these days read much Camus, but there was a time at mid-century that he and other French existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were required reading for anyone with any pretensions to being a serious intellectual. (And yes, for many of us, pretension was le mot juste.)
Chong ’s novel works as a stand-alone piece but read back to back with the original, as was done for this review, the two versions conduct an impressive dialogue. Taken together, the two novels reflect on fundamental questions of mortality and death, human connection and, solidarity and estrangement.
The earlier novel is often interpreted as metaphor representing guilt and complicity in Vichy France, while the plague in Chong ’s version can be read as a narrative meditation on the plagues of racism, sexism, toxic individualism and greed that sicken contemporary Vancouver. Highly recommended.