Great Novels About Plagues and Pandemic to Terrify or Cheer You During Lockdown

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – If you are tired of scrolling Facebook or watching disaster movies on Netflix, another solution for lockdown tedium is to read a book. And if you, like many others, are unable to pretend the Covid-19 situation is not happening, you probably want a book that is at least in some way connected to the current world health crisis.

Fortunately, there are many great novels that are based around epidemics and something is available for all tastes. One of the oldest plague stories is ‘The Decameron’ by Boccaccio, which was written just after the Black Death and has as a framing story a group of men and women telling each other stories as they hide out in a remote villa to avoid dying of the illness that is devastating medieval Europe.

Closer to the present day, Albert Camus’s ‘The Plague’ is one of the best and best-known of these books. During the national lockdown in Italy, this novel has shot up in the best-seller lists. It is set in a very ordinary small city in French Algeria that gets cut off from the rest of the world for about a year during an outbreak of bubonic plague.

This book is not (only) about the horrors of the plague, but more importantly about what happens when normal life is disrupted for a community, and also about the sadness of separation and the boredom of isolation. Written (perhaps) as an allegory about the Nazi occupation of France in World War II, it tries to impart a simple lesson in times of difficulty: be decent and persevere.

Daniel Defoe is best known for Robinson Crusoe, but he also wrote the wonderful ‘A Journal of the Plague Year’, a well-researched but ultimately fictionalised account of the 1665 plague in London. The journal purports to be an eyewitness account and was originally read as such, but as Defoe was only five years old at the time we know that this cannot be the case.

Some believe that the account was based on his uncle’s diaries, but regardless of the source, the book gives an intimate account of life under the plague, including unscrupulous individuals who bribed guards to escape quarantine, a sentiment that is easier to understand, if not condone, in the current climate.

Mary Shelley, another writer best-known for a non-plague book, in this case Frankenstein, also wrote a book based on a pandemic: ‘The Last Man’. In this 500-page doorstopper, a plague ravages the planet, killing most of the population. First published in 1826 but set in the late 2000s, this book is a hilarious fail at science fiction, with characters still mostly travelling by horse and the conflict between Greece and the Ottoman Empire still ongoing.

However, the effects of the plague are much more believable. Slow-moving, and frankly boring at times, this book’s length will at least keep you occupied for a good while.

Briefly, some other books on this theme by well-known authors: Stephen King’s ‘The Stand’; Nobel Prize winners Gabriel García Márquez’s ‘Love in Times of Cholera’ (‘El amor en los tiempos del cólera’) and José Saramago’s ‘Blindness’ (‘Ensaio sobre a cegueira’); and ‘Oryx and Crake’ by (twice) Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood, best known for ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’.

Happy reading!