a journal of a plague year (defoe)

Whilst reading Journal of a Plague Year it struck me that the narrator seemed almost preternaturally relaxed about the whole affair. Yes, people were falling down dead in the street, yes, society was on the brink of collapse, but all the same, our unflappable narrator calmly guides us through the terrible year of 1665. Which is a great consolation, in the year 2020, that reassurance that there is a normality on the other side, not so far away, we will be able to return to doing those social things which we as a species tend to enjoy, unless you’re a Schopenhauer or a Saint Simon Stylites. The novel, (for that is what it is), includes typical Defoe-ian digressions, individual tales and anecdotes tucked away, unusual personalities who the narrator comes across in his wanderings around the city, in spite of the peril. There’s also a highly contemporary fascination with figures, with frequent tallies posted of how the plague affected the different London boroughs. For Londoners there’s the ghoulish fascination of locating where in the city the plague pits were dug and the descriptions of the circumstances of the burials of the sick are some of the most harrowing elements of the book, something our generation had never known the like of, until now. The tone of the book, it struck me, was remarkably similar to that of Robinson Crusoe, a laconic way of dealing with fate, making the best of things. Something which once upon a time we might have called inherently British. There’s no wailing or gnashing of teeth. The retrospective perspective consoles: the narrator lived this time, and got through to the other side and we shall too, god willing. (It is in times of plague that the instinct to believe in god seems most acute, for who else is it who should decide who lives and who dies, if not god?). 

So there was something reassuring about reading this novel, not least in the last thirty pages, as the plague recedes and people start to go about their business again. Until I clocked the publication date. 1722. Some sixty years after the events being recounted. As though someone was writing about 2020 in 2080. My stupidity immediately struck me; I know that Defoe is an 18th century writer. Yet, in the reading, I never once doubted that the narrator was Defoe himself. Because, and this is self-evident, this is what I wished to believe. I wanted that confident, fearless voice to be completely authentic. It was my consolation. 

Something which tells us as much about the process of reading as it does anything else. (It makes me think about the gospels for example.) Journal of a Plague Year is a masterly work of recreation, of pseudo-documentary writing, very much of a piece with Robinson Crusoe. Yet whether it has anything to teach us about how to manage the anxiety of living through plague is doubtful. I can imagine my niece’s grandchild wanting to write about the great confinement of 2020 and talking to her grandmother about it, and there will be value in those memories, and they might make for a great book, but time will have lent its balm to the actual events, because time ameliorates like nothing else can.