A Journal of the Plague Year
- Jul 25, 2017
- 3 min read
★★★★☆
So taken was I with Albert Camus’s The Plague, more so upon reflection than during its reading—and perhaps even more so now at the completion of yet another book about Yersinia pestis—that I immediately sought out Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year as its follow up. At this point I may be a full-blown plague junkie, as I’ve already added John Kelly’s The Great Mortality to my reading list, but I digress.
Although nearly 300 years separate the events of Camus’s and Defoe’s novels, and the advance of medicine and the diminishment of superstitious belief over that time notwithstanding, it is remarkable what commonalities exist between them. They make excellent bedfellows, and, if I may say, really do go well one after the last as I read them, with The Plague followed by A Journal of the Plague Year. Where the former centers on a relatively small group of principle characters and their lives and actions, with the populous at the periphery, the latter is almost wholly devoted to the general populous at large, with their very circumstances and lives at its center, and the result is that the two together paint a very full and rich portrait of events of utmost calamity and despair, the likes of which can scarcely be imagined today.
Three things bear mentioning: First, despite its being written in the years immediately before its publication in 1722, Defoe, to his credit, goes to great lengths, quite successfully so, to create a contemporaneous eyewitness account of the Great Plague of London of 1665, including the relation of specific locales, anecdotes, lists of casualties, and the like. Second, while it is presented as a journal, and being, by and large, chronological in nature, the book lacks headers, chapters, or other kinds of sectioning. Stephen King’s Cujo, was similarly structured, and the dramatic effect of this unbroken prose is to create, then continually increase, uneasiness in the reader. Third, unless you’re a frequenter of 18th century writing, some adjustment to grammar and terminology are required, and, as I have done my best to emulate here, Defoe’s abundant (for lack of a better word) style takes some getting used to. To wit: “I have only to add, that I do not relate this, any more than some of the other, as a fact within my own knowledge, so as that I can vouch the truth of them; and especially that of the man being cured by the extravagant adventure, which I confess I do not think very possible, but it may serve to confirm the many desperate things which the distressed people, falling into deliriums and what we call light-headedness, were frequently run upon at that time, and how infinitely more such there would have been if such people had not been confined by the shutting up of houses; and this I take to be the best, if not the only good thing, which was performed by that severe method.” For my own part, in spite of also being a lover of Hemingway’s simple, unadorned prose, once I adjusted fully, I found Defoe’s style both delightful and infectious.
According to Wikipedia, Defoe wrote more than three hundred works in his lifetime. This was my first, and while he is most famous for Robinson Crusoe, a book for whatever reason I have not, until now, been moved to read, I’m at no shortage for options to consider. If any other is half as enjoyable as A Journal of the Plague Year I’ll be one happy reader.
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