Albert Camus and the Return of the Outsider

‘The sky seemed to split apart from end to end to pour its fire down upon me. My whole body tensed as I gripped the gun more tightly. It set off the trigger. I could feel the smooth barrel in my hand and it was then, with that sharp, deafening sound, that it all began. I shook off the sweat and the sun. I realised that I had destroyed the natural balance of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I had once been happy. Then I fired four more times into the lifeless body, where the bullets sank without leaving a trace. And it was as if I had rapped sharply, four times, on the fatal door of destiny.’ That was Meursault, talking to us, in Albert Camus’ The Outsider. He killed the Arab—no name, no backstory, and no word spoken—because of the sun. That was in 1942.

‘I squeezed the trigger and fired twice. Two bullets. One in the belly, and the other in the neck. That makes seven all told, I thought at once, absurdly. (But the first five, the ones that killed Musa, had been fired twenty years earlier…)’ On the day of the killing ‘the moon was looking on too, it too; the whole sky seemed to be nothing but moon. It had already begun to soothe the earth, and the damp heat was rapidly diminishing.’ This is Harun, brother of the Arab who was killed by Camus’ sun-struck protagonist on the beach, talking to you about his score-settling victim with a name, Joseph, in the Algerian journalist Kamel Daoud’s debut novel The Meursault Investigation (translated from the French by John Cullen, One World, 143 pages, £8.99.)

I read Daoud, and reread Camus (in the excellent new translation by Sandra Smith), in a London mourning the death of British holidaymakers on a private beach in Tunisia. It could not have been the sunstroke that made the so-called lone wolf pull the trigger. It could not have been the sheer boredom of being alive in a world where everyone else was seeking answers that made him a killer on a beach. Meursault, who killed the nameless Arab under a blazing sun on a beach in Algiers did not believe in God, or, for that matter, in men who talked on behalf of God. When the chaplain wanted to talk to him about God in his death cell, Meursault told him that ‘I had very little time left and I didn’t want to waste it on God.’ When the imam wanted to talk God with the brother of the Arab killed by Meursault 20 years later, he echoed Camus’ hero and told the priest that he was not his guide, ‘he was not even on my side.’

The new killer on the beach is guided by a blazing God.

In fiction, there is no killing more casual than what happens on the beach in Algiers in a sweltering afternoon. And there is no victim more insignificant, not even worthy of a name, than the Arab in The Outsider. The Meursault Investigation is born out of that casualness, that insignificance, that namelessness— that sand and heat of Algeria. Daoud gives the Arab a name, a mother, a father, a brother—a life. The story is narrated by the Arab’s brother; and he is telling it to an unnamed investigator in a bar in the Algerian city of Oran, which also happens to be the base of the novelist. ‘Mama’s still alive today,’ so it begins, in a retrospective inversion of fiction’s most memorable first line.

Harun was just seven when the big brother was killed; it was total obliteration. There was no body, no burial, nothing. Musa didn’t come home, he just vanished, and it made his mother a ghost hunter. First the death was a report in the scrap of a newspaper his mother kept; then it became a book. The French author did not name him, says Musa’s brother, ‘because if he had, my brother would have caused the murderer a problem with his conscience: You can’t easily kill a man when he has a given name.’ But he does, later in the book, with a helping hand from his mother, not under the sun but the moon, not on the beach but in the courtyard, and the killed man was even given a burial.

There would be a trial, as there was one for Meursault, and equally bizarre. In The Outsider, the bigger crime for the prosecutor and the judge was not the killing of the Arab but Meursault’s indifference, his soullessness, his lack of emotion—he didn’t even cry—at his mother’s funeral. The prosecutor tried to look into Meursault’s soul but failed. ‘He said that, in truth, I had no soul, and that nothing that makes a man human, not a single moral principle, could be found within me.’ For the narrator of The Meursault Investigation, too, the bigger crime is not the killing of the French settler but his non-participation in the liberation movement. He should have done the killing a bit earlier and made it part of the struggle, but why now, in a period of reconciliation? At the time of the killing, says Harun, ‘God wasn’t as alive and heavy in this country as he is today, and in any case, I’m not afraid of hell.’ At the moment of his crime, he ‘felt a door somewhere was definitely closing on me. I concluded that I had been condemned—and for that, I’d needed neither judge nor God nor the charade of a trial. Only myself.’ Ah, the same fatal door of destiny, and we are drawn into the horrifying sight of it reducing the distance between Meursault and Harun.

The revenge of the Arab becomes his own punishment. In The Meursault Investigation, Harun, the more he puts Meursault—or his creator—on a retrial, the more he resembles the French. The mother, the killing, the court, the trial, the girlfriend (Marie for Meursault; Meriem for Harun), the balcony from which the narrator watches the world, the heat, the priest, the intrusive God… The only difference is that whereas the style of The Outsider is austere and linear, metaphysical and detached, The Meursault Investigation is wordy and circular, clever and funny—and slightly bigger. Still, somehow, they are united by the same mutations of history; and as Harun says, ‘this isn’t a trite story of forgiveness or revenge, it’s a curse, it’s a trap.’

It is a big mistake if we assume that Daoud, the Arab who has a problem with being an Arab—‘Arab-ness is like Negro-ness, which only exists in the white man’s eyes’—is putting Camus on trial. He is reimagining his cultural obsession; he is paying his tribute to the master by transplanting Meursault, and renaming him for a different Algeria where the sun can still fry your mind. Here the narrator of The Meursault Investigation is Meursault, the outsider, reborn as an Arab in one of fiction’s most rewarding role reversals. He has been condemned to grow old. The only verse in the Koran that resonates with him is: ‘If you kill a single person, it is as if you have killed the whole of mankind.’ The brother of the Arab martyr defied the struggle for the elimination of all the Meursaults when it was most needed. He killed under the wrong star, at the wrong time; only the gods remained same, staring into the soullessness of the outsider as they did in 1942. The Meursault Investigation, shortlisted for Prix Goncourt, is meta-fiction at its best. Algiers-born Camus’ position on Algeria’s liberation—he was for Arab-French reconciliation rather than separation—made him an outsider in the Paris of Sartre. Daoud is indebted, and he is worthy of his master.

Meursault is ‘the only Christ we deserve,’ Camus said. While on trial, he wanted to be honest, even if it meant the guillotine, the precision of which was elaborated by Meursault himself. The killer on the beach today is guided by a god who has already made Kamel Daoud a marked man.

Albert CamusKamel DaoudPrix GoncourtThe Outsider. The Meursault Investigation