Penguin Modern Classics, Published 1942
111pgs
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| Albert Camus |
'My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know.'
Mersault lives in Algeria, in a low-paid job living a routine life. He doesn't much seem perturbed by his elderly 'mama's' death in chapter one; written from his perspective, his recount of the funeral procession centres more on the heat and the dark humour that arises from the sight of one his mother's old-aged friends struggling to keep up with the hearse, trying to take shortcuts to keep up. From this point on, we see Mersault's life meander along, unperturbed by just about everything you would assume would evoke some human emotion. For instance Marie, his 'lover': 'she wanted to know if I loved her. I replied as I had once before that that didn't mean anything, but said I was pretty sure I didn't love her'. He's not even concerned with the fact with the fact that one of his best pal, Raymond, is a mistress-beating pimp, giving him a positive testimony to the police. He's not a likeable character at this point, and is just about detestable when, in a nihilistic, existentially meaningless act of random violence kills a man, we see the Outsider come face-to-face with the justice system. The novel's second part see's Mersault on trial, and, beyond it's easy-to-understand plot, is a fascinating take on the protagonist's view of the absurdity of the trial, the absurdity of religion and death and even the absurdity of life. Mersault's tale is bleak and morally obscure, but I must say it was a downright compelling book.
Camus' craftsmanship as a writer really helps to establish the protagonist's character, this overriding sense within Mersault that he doesn't find meaning or pleasure from conventional sources. An example of this is when Marie proposes to him; the scene has hardly any prevalence even within the paragraph it's featured in, Mersault's thoughts moving onto the next event without much thought. In another subplot, we see elderly Salamano, who lives in the same block of flats, who regualrly beats his dog; we see Raymond's conventional analysis 'It's awful!' countered by Mersault's to almost darkly comic effect ('He asked me if I thought it was disgusting and I said no.' There's no justification to Mersault's reasoning, and we never find out quite why he had the urge to kill at the midpoint of the book; it's an interesting first-person perspective, where things are recounted succintly and almost trivially- as the Outsider, he feels no need to justify himself or persuade us to agree with his ideology, neither to the people judging him in the trial or to us, the reader. Because of his honesty and commitment to his existentialist philosophy, there are just as many reasons to like Mersault as to detest him: he is unfaltering in his honesty, and is resolute in his commitment to the present, uncaring of the past or the distant future. I wonder if written from an objective, third-person perspective, our protagonist's actions would just be plain immoral and unquestionably awful, no doubts about it. However, the genius of Camus is how Mersault's thought commentary makes some sort of abstract sense: he is able to derive empathy from the reader towards a character who is in actual fact a murderer.
The novel- novella I suppose you could call it- has been written in such a way that, for the main part, most of it on the surface is fairly banal and uneventful, apart from two scenes. Take chapter two: all it is is Mersault looking down upon his street from his balcony and analyzing the Algiers nightlife, isolated, physically distant as well as metaphorically. However this lack of event shouldn't put people off; for one thing, it's brilliantly written and well observed, and infused with symbolism. I feel like this inclusion of the banal was another piece of existentialist commentary: the uneventful is just as significant as the eventful, that life often plateau's along an axis of mediocre, with the occasional flashpoint of eventfulness changing the course of our lives, before returning to mediocre once more. In this case, Mersault kills an Arab at the midpoint of the book, on a burning hot beach. This scene (Part One, Chapter 6) is my favourite in the book, the disturbance of equilibrium that changes Mersault's life forever, recounted with a total absence of emotion or attempt at justification. The scene puts you in a trance (I dare you not to feel the heat of the sun yourself when you read that passage) and is as thrilling as you'll ever read. The oppressive heat and the knowledge there's a gun in Mersault's pocket induces an almost-unbearable sense of foreboding. For me, along with the novel's last chapter, this part determines its status as a modern classic. So, why did he call the Arab? He had no reason too, right, so why call him? This is what I like about Camus; he seems to be saying to me, from beyond the grave: 'Why not?' I look at that picture of him puffing on a cigarette and he looks at me as though to say, 'Hah! Gotcha! Why do bad things happen, why do good things happen, why does anything happen?...Why not?' I know this book is taught in a lot of A-Level classes, and I can almost see the perplexed faced: 'Miss, um...what just happened?' Camus is a cheeky so-and-so, this is existentialism, don't you know, there are more questions raised in this book than there are answers. Personally, I loved this ambiguity.
The other scene I'll draw your attention to is the last chapter. By this point, Mersault has been sentenced to the guillotine- I found it interesting how he keeps trying onto hold onto the fantastical notion of escaping the chop by running away from his fate. I found this ironic, given that by this point his life is completely devoid of purpose, merely existing until the guillotine arrives. However, I felt most empathetic towards him at this point, he was at his most vulnerable: perhaps the knowledge of his imminent death stripped back his brash, curmudgeonly outer-self and made him more aware of his human self? The last sentence (you'll know what I mean if you decide to read it) suggests otherwise, that he welcomes death, but I wonder if he's being totally truthful. He meets with the prison chaplain in this chapter, against his will; in many ways these two characters within these confined prison cells, are the total opposite of the other. One finds devout meaning in religion and God, the other Godless and recklessly devoid of a moral compass. They have it out in an argument, that was, frankly, inevitable, and I felt truly sorry for both of them.
I'm going to leave it there. This was a brilliant book, well-worthy of a lengthy review, it's that sort of book filled with symbolic potential and philosophical questioning. I'm not totally with Mersault's ideology all the way, but the denouement of this book was sort of refreshing: without meaning, there is no burden, no pressure, nothing to live up to. Which is nice, isn't it? Mind, make sure you don't use that freedom to murder someone.
'Nothing. nothing mattered and I knew very well why. He also knew why. From the depths of my future, throughout all this absurd life I had lived, a gathering wind swept toward me, stripping bare along its path everything that had been possible in the years gone by, years that seemed just as unreal as the ones ahead.'
Rating: 4/5
