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65 of 67 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Public health primer, January 15, 2003
This review is from: A Journal of the Plague Year (Modern Library Classics) (Paperback)
Probably one of the first examples of journalistic fiction, Defoe's "A Journal of the Plague Year" is a pseudo-eyewitness account of the London plague of 1665. Writing this in 1722, Defoe casts himself into the role of his uncle whom he calls H.F. and who recounts the events in grisly detail but with magnanimous compassion. Aside from the prose, the book has a surprisingly modern edge in the way it combines facts about a sensationally dire historical event with "human interest" stories for personal appeal. It seems so factual that at times it's easy to forget that it's just a fictitious account of a real event. The plague (H.F. writes) arrives by way of carriers from the European mainland and spreads quickly through the unsanitary, crowded city despite official preventive measures; the symptoms being black bruises, or "tokens," on the victims' bodies, resulting in fever, delirium, and usually death in a matter of days. The public effects of the plague are readily imaginable: dead-carts, mass burial pits, the stench of corpses not yet collected, enforced quarantines, efforts to escape to the countryside, paranoia and superstitions, quacks selling fake cures, etc. Through all these observations, H.F. remains a calm voice of reason in a city overtaken by panic and bedlam. By the time the plague has passed, purged partly by its own self-limiting behavior and partly by the Great Fire of the following year, the (notoriously inaccurate) Bills of Mortality indicate the total death toll to be about 68,000, but the actual number is probably more like 100,000 -- about a fifth of London's population. Like Defoe's famous survivalist sketch "Robinson Crusoe," the book's palpable moralism is adequately camouflaged by the conviction of its narrative and the humanity of its narrator, a man who, like Crusoe, trusts God's providence to lead him through the hardships, come what may. What I like about this "Journal" is that its theme is more relevant than its narrow, dated subject matter suggests: levelheadedness in the face of catastrophe and the emergence of a stronger and wiser society.
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36 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Journalism not fiction, March 31, 2006
The Penguin edition restores Defoe's original punctuation, with capitals for nouns and colons for stops, so that the writing has the vitality, weight and elasticity that Defoe meant when he wrote it. To enjoy this book you need to read it as creative journalism rather than fiction otherwise it will seem dull, and Daniel Defoe is never dull. It can't satisfy as fiction because it isn't fiction. It doesn't have any of the benefits of fiction such as plot, author's whimsy, or character development. The Journal is based on the eyewitness experience of his uncle Henry Foe, which has been expanded by Defoe's own journalistic research after the event. He has simply taken the eyewitness experience of his uncle and created a masterpiece out of it for posterity. This technique began with his first book, The Storm, except that in that book the eyewitness accounts - perhaps spruced up by Defoe himself - and his own work were separated. In the Journal of the Plague Year these are blended together so that his book has the vividness of the eyewitness view of the events as well as all the talent and research that history would wish of an account of these events. By misclassifying the book as fiction (and by modernizing the punctuation) we have been degrading the book's value to history and to readers. I wish the typeface was bigger and printed blacker and this applies to the Modern Library edition too, as does the above review.
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19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A stunning blend of fact and imagination., September 9, 2000
Defoe has pulled off something brilliant here. Although he was only 5 years old in 1665 (the year of the title), in 1720 he set down a narrative full of rich details blending fact and imagination. The thoroughness of his descriptions and the constant realism come close to convincing you that these are first-hand observations: but these are *not* first hand observations; his narrator is a fiction, recalling events he saw as an adult. The persuasiveness of Defoe's fiction comes from his specificity, and little comments suggesting the narrator has an additional life outside the Journal. He mentions not only the dead (and the increasing losses), but the quacks taking advantage of the gullible, the quarantining of infected houses, the marks on the doors, the efforts to escape from quarantined houses, the efforts of the mayor's offfice to limit the spread of infection, and the public pits where the bodies were thrown. And so on into the facets of everyday life. Through it all, his portrayal of the narrator also has a personal richness, a consistent first-person perspective; the conceit is reinforced by insertions such as "what I wrote of my private meditations I reserve for private use, and desire it may not be made public on any account whatever." The narrator is a product of Defoe's imagination, of course, and similarly, any private meditations such a narrator would have. But Defoe has cleverly made the narrator real.
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