Exile And The Kingdom - Albert Camus

EXILE AND THE KINGDOM – ALBERT CAMUS

Exile And The Kingdom is a collection of six short stories written by Albert Camus and first published in 1957. So to cut to the quick: what have we got? Well, Camus was a brilliant mind and a brilliant writer and indeed is one of my firm favourites but for some reason reading this particular book of his was somewhat of a chore. On finishing it I did something I hardly ever do when it comes to books and that's to look at Wikipedia to see what it had to say about it there and curiously it's a completely different interpretation to mine. So much so, in fact, that I couldn't tell if it was me reading too much into the stories or actually too little?

The Adulterous Woman centres on a woman on a business trip with her husband and her not wishing to be there. At one point she looks at him and thinks to herself how love, even when filled with hate, doesn't have such a sullen face as his. During the middle of the night whilst staying at some crotchety old hotel at the edge of the desert, she steals herself away from their bed to take in the view from a balcony. It is here that she becomes conscious of the empty void in her life and for a moment wishes for nothing other than to throw herself into that void. This is the adultery she commits to which Camus alludes.

The Renegade is a depiction of the supremacy of evil and how evil begets evil even when challenged by an act of supposed goodness - that in itself can even be taken as an act of evil. There is no surpassing or undermining of it. Evil, it would seem, can be challenged but cannot be overthrown so the only solution to evil is to destroy it utterly. It's only weakness – it's Achilles Heel – is in the fact that evil knows it can be destroyed. Evil is not indestructible and it's aware of this. As Hitler once said: “Only one thing could have stopped us – if our adversaries had understood and from the first day had smashed, with the most extreme brutality, the nucleus of our new movement”. For some reason, The Renegade reminds me of Behold The Man, by Michael Moorcock, where the time traveller goes back in time to confirm the existence of Jesus only to end up enacting the role of Jesus and being himself crucified.

The Silent Men is about how the boss of a small business not doing the right thing for his staff leads to his staff not doing the right thing for him when tragedy strikes. The lesson being: an eye for any eye leaves the whole world blind. The Guest, on the other hand, is almost the complete opposite when a man trying to do the right thing ends up in fear of himself being murdered. The Artist At Work is almost a reiteration of Camus' famous line 'in the midst of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer'. Or even possibly a description of Camus' own life? Whilst The Growing Stone is like a cross between Camus' The Fall and The Myth Of Sisyphus.

Context is all, of course, which means the date of publication of Exile And The Kingdom – 1957 – needs to be taken into consideration, it coming fifteen years after the publication of The Outsider and The Myth Of Sisyphus, one year after the publication of The Fall, and three years before his untimely death in 1960. It needs to be asked, what was Camus trying to do with these stories? What was the thought behind them? Is the reading of these stories effected by the day and age in which they are read, as in 2020 when the world is going through a pandemic-led existential crisis? As I said, am I trying to read too much into them or not enough? Whatever, I'm left with the feeling that Exile And The Kingdom is for Camus completists only.

John Serpico