Camus’ The Plague, in which the city of Oran in Algeria is shut down for months as the plague decimates its people (as happened in Oran in the 19th Century), also abounds with parallels to today’s crisis. Local leaders are reluctant at first to acknowledge the early signs of the plague dying rats littering the streets. “Are our city fathers aware that the decaying bodies of these rodents constitute a grave danger to the population?” asks a columnist in the local newspaper. The book’s narrator Dr Bernard Rieux reflects the quiet heroism of medical workers. “I have no idea what’s awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing,” he says. In the end, there’s the lesson learned by the plague’s survivors: “They knew now that if there is one thing one can always yearn for, and sometimes attain, it is human love.”

The Spanish flu of 1918 reshaped the world, leading to the loss of 50 million people, on the heels of 10 million dead from World War One. Ironically, the dramatic global impact of the flu was overshadowed by the even more dramatic events of the war, which inspired countless novels. As people now practice ‘social distancing’ and communities around the globe withdraw into lockdown, Katherine Anne Porter’s description of the devastation created by the Spanish flu in her 1939 novel Pale Horse, Pale Rider feels familiar: “It’s as bad as anything can be... all the theatres and nearly all the shops and restaurants are closed, and the streets have been full of funerals all day and ambulances all night”, heroine Miranda’s friend Adam tells her shortly after she is diagnosed with influenza.

Porter portrays Miranda’s fevers and medicines, and weeks of illness and recovery, before she awakens to a new world reshaped by losses from the flu and from the war. Porter almost died from the plague of influenza herself. “I was in some strange way altered,” she told The Paris Review in a 1963 interview. “It took me a long time to go out and live in the world again. I was really ‘alienated’ in the pure sense.”

All too plausible

Twenty-first Century epidemics – Sars in 2002, Mers in 2012, Ebola in 2014 – have inspired novels about post-plague desolation and breakdown, deserted cities and devastated landscapes.

Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009) shows us a post-pandemic world with humans nearly extinct, most of the population wiped out 25 years before by the ‘Waterless Flood’ a virulent plague that “travelled through the air as if on wings, it burned through cities like fire”.