Improbable Success

The subject is sickness and death. The time is the 17th century. The characters are ordinary people, neither heroes nor villains. The ending is foretold since the events are historical. The story is punctuated with statistics. Hardly a recipe for success, and yet the book is brilliant. The performance is matter of fact, almost monotonous without much emotional variation. Yet it works perfectly to make the plague seem as present now as it was then. It feels like an eyewitness account by a survivor.

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The novel as journalism

A Journal of the Plague Year isn't a novel in any conventional sense; it's a collection of statistics and anecdotes made by someone who identifies himself as a merchant, and who stayed behind when others fled. Defoe may have based it on a relative’s actual journal. The anecdotes are interesting, the statistics less so. What I found compelling about the book, even more than the facts it related, was the narrator's journalistic efforts to separate truth from falsehood by interviewing people and reviewing official documents. (The latter effort was frustrated by the Great Fire of London that swept through the following year and destroyed many of the city records.)

One aspect of the plague is dealt with at length. With the richest people fleeing for the country and with commerce at a standstill, hordes of the working poor lost their positions. Only an extensive effort at gathering and distributing charity saved these people from starvation. Otherwise the authorities would never have been able to keep the peace: the thousands of deserted houses would have been attacked by desperate mobs looking for plunder. As it was, masses of the poor fled the city and camped out in fields near a village, until they were chased down the road to a new one.

At one point as many as seven thousand people a week were dying of the plague - 50,000 dead in the space of two months. In another two-week period, 30,000 died. Funerals were impossible. Bodies were gathered by dead carts that made their rounds at night; the bodies were dumped into common pits. One drunken piper was picked up alive and thrown into the dead cart. At the last minute, about to be dumped into the pit, he came to and insisted he wasn't dead, and fortunately for him, he was believed.

Adding to the terror was the absence of any understanding of how the plague spread. It was known that being near someone who was infected made it more likely that you would get it. But no one knew the actual mechanism. A huge effort was made to rid the city of all dogs, cats, mice, and rats, but it appears that no one suspected the real culprit: fleas. (One theory was that the stench of death itself could spread the disease, so one defense was to carry around a pouncet box.) Churches closed down; if one person in a house caught the plague, the whole family was boarded up in the house and left to die. The streets were eerily quiet. An abandoned purse was left untouched until someone had the bright idea of igniting the purse with gunpowder and letting the coins it contained drop into a pail of water.

Ultimately the plague just burned itself out. No one knew why and most were left with only one explanation: God’s judgement had sent the plague, and God’s mercy ended it.

Andrew Cullum’s narration is well-paced and friendly. The book is a humane exploration of a time of great suffering.

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28 people found this helpful

Tedious but inciteful

Hard to get through bits, but some great insights and parallels. Not really a story.

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Brilliant reading of the Bills of Mortality

The narration is fantastic. The story is... well, if the text were literally historical and documentary, one could forgive it being so highly repetitive (for which, by the end, the author repetitively apologizes) and full of tedious lists of actuarial statistics. Get used to hearing recitations of the Bills of Mortality, which are interesting primarily because one begins to wonder: what exactly is the fatal quality of "Teeth"?

This is a work of fiction pretending to be a documentary, but adding no real twist to the topic. Maybe I'm spoiled by fictional filmed documentaries along the lines of "Documentary Now!" (2015-present). All that fiction achieves in the present case is to make you doubt the veracity of the supposedly historical statistics. Did Defoe rely on real historic documentation? That would at least be something. But if so, why cast it as a work of fiction? It's not exactly Borges.

Still, in the interests of completion, the audiobook actually made it possible to get through this slog, which never would have happened had I relied on the written text. And there were a few moments of grim clarity, where the description of people's carelessness in the face of infection, especially after the first wave had just barely retreated, were strikingly relevant to contemporary circumstances.

With such good narration, I don't hesitate to recommend this, if you're a history buff. But is it history? The degree of research it would take to draw the line between which details are historical and which are fictional would take an academic career to unravel. On the bright side, I see that a fourth season of "Documentary Now!" is slated to be released this year...

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Strong start, similarities to pandemic are uncanny

The book begins as a proper journal of life in London as the plague hits. So much of it reminds me of our current pandemic, such as people pushing fake cures, meat packers being heavily hit, and folks turning to brewing and baking at home (though out of necessity then). It offers a lot of insight into what life was like and how people were trying to get by.

From here the book shifts to a collect of secondhand stories and anecdotes, with lists of statistics thrown in as well. The latter is probably interesting for historians, but it didn't make for very good listening.


Narrator does a great job and his voice fits the vibe of the book.

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Surprising

Surprisingly relevant today. People's psychology and behaviour seem to have progressed very little... Stylistically impeccable, superbly interpreted.

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The More Things Change, The More They Don't

The text is tedious. The language is florid and archaic (being published nearly 3 centuries ago). The narration is stilted as he necessarily over-enunciates. The material itself is dry, yet somehow all the more fascinating for all of the above.

I'm a fan of medical history, and of post-apocalyptic fiction. I was recommended this book during the time of COVID, Not sure I'd have stuck with it otherwise, this was definitely the right time for me to listen to it! The parallels are unmistakable, Human behavior has not changed, only the details have been altered. Hearing in a nearly first-person contemporary account, how statistics were altered to initially minimize and later possibly exaggerate death tolls, the proliferation of charlatans, and the influence of rumor on life-changing decisions was eye-opening and more than a little dismaying.

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3 people found this helpful

It’s a book alright.

I had to read this book for class but procrastinated too long and ended up downing 5 shots of espresso and listening to most of it on 2x speed. It was not an ideal experience.

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1 person found this helpful

history brought vividly to life

A Journal of the Plague Year surprised me. I didn't expect to enjoy it and only picked it up thanks to a group's choice, and the fact that we are in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic. But I found this book much easier to read and more interesting than I expected it to be. Defoe includes loads of facts, numbers and statistics, making it more journalism than anything. But the fact that he centers the story of that one year on one man's view of London and everything that happened, allowed it to read more easily and enjoyably.

Defoe himself was only 5 years old at the time the book took place so his memory was likely very limited. However, he describes the sights and sounds and smells of London so vividly that it feels as though this is actually his real journal. The atmosphere of place is tangible on every page. And for me this is what made the book enjoyable. It isn't a book with plot or even much character development. It is truly about one place in one specific time. And it is so rich in the description of that place that the reader can see it like a movie in their minds.

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reading could have been better

wanted so much to listen this book. but voice is so robotic. why why why

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2 people found this helpful