Camus' final work to be published in his life, The Fall, concerns not only one fall. Most fundamental is the fall from grace of a high-flying Parisian lawyer, confident in his virtue and self-worth, down to being down-and-out in the low-end Amsterdam bar from which he unreliably narrates his descent and observations in a drunken monologue. The lawyer in question is Jean-Baptiste Clamence; his new profession is as judge-penitent, the definition of which is the central aim of the novel.

Predictably there are serious questions and uncomfortable truths in Camus' Godless world. Complacent, bourgeois virtue is subjected to sustained criticism. Clamence lambasts his previous sense of virtuous superiority - "I climbed the heights, I lit bonfires up there and heard the joyous acclaim rising up towards me". Events and revelations show him that he is virtuous in part as a public performance, all for his own self-aggrandisement. He begins to see "sweet dreams of oppression" behind his supposed moral integrity. His fall to the role of judge-penitent is the consequence of this realisation.

But the fall is not wholly negative. Like the Biblical fall from the Garden of Eden, the fall in this work is one not only from comfort and bliss, but also from naivety. Clamence loses the bliss of ignorance, but in doing so comes to much more complex, accurate and authentic understandings of life, and of how to live. He realises the heights were illusory, but in descending he reaches the level of truth, where one may judge without gross hypocrisy. The fall is intellectually positive. The difficulties of understanding are better than naive innocence.

The language is frequently religious in its allusions, referring to Dante amongst others ("Have you noticed that the concentric canals of Amsterdam are like the circles of hell? A bourgeois hell..."). It is thoroughly grounded in existing thought and life - in the intricacies of human activity and thought as they are in the world. The final and most important fall is therefore this: the fall that is the descent of existentialist philosophy from rarefied and inflexible abstractions to the existent world.

The Fall reviewed by David Addison