A YOUNG MAN'S mother dies. On hearing the bad news, he wonders whether she had actually died the previous day. For Meursault, a clerk in an office, the death comes as more of an inconvenience than a personal loss. He is young, single and tends to eat at a local restaurant when he doesn't feel like cooking. Meursault enjoys the sun and the sea, and lives the life of an ordinary middle-class French-Algerian, a citizen of France living in Algiers, earning sufficient money to support an easy lifestyle dominated by the beach.
The laconic anti-hero of Camus's taut first novel, L'étranger (The Outsider), remains a symbol of youthful defiance; no one can tell him how to display his feelings. Nor will he feign emotion. His non-committal attitude to his mother's passing shocks the staff at the nursing home where he had sent her three years earlier. As he travels there by bus, he is more aware of the heat than of emotion: ". . . during the past year, I seldom went to see her," he recalls, "it would have meant losing my Sunday - not to mention . . . going to the bus, getting my ticket, and spending two hours on the journey, each way." His indifference is unsettling. When asked by the mortuary porter if he wishes to view his mother, Meursault says no. He remains detached at the funeral and admits to not knowing his mother's age. After the burial, during which he is alert to the bright sunlight, his abiding sensation is of fatigue.
Back in Algiers he wakes to his Saturday morning and decides on a swim. At the beach he meets up with a girl who once worked at his office. After swimming and sunbathing together, he invites her to the cinema to see the comedy of the moment. She accepts and then notices his black mourning tie. When he explains about his mother's death, he recalls: "She made no remark, though I thought she shrank away a little." She recovers, sees the movie and spends the night with him. He wakes alone and prepares some food. He then settles down to watching life pass by under his window. By evening he is ready to eat again, realising that "Mother was now buried, and tomorrow I'd be going back to work as usual. Really, nothing in my life had changed."
Having established his central character's personality, Camus sustains his non-committal tone. When Marie asks him if he loves her, he recalls saying that "that sort of question had no meaning, really; but I suppose I didn't. She looked sad for a bit . . ." He does not even get involved when a friend of his, Raymond, hits an Arab woman. The following weekend Meursault and Marie join Raymond on a trip to another friend's beach house. The Arab woman's brother pursues Raymond and a skirmish takes place. The police step in. But there is a further episode and Meursault, in possession of Raymond's gun, murders one of the Arabs.
His crime is serious. Yet during the trial that takes place it is Meursault's indifference, not his killing of the Arab, which condemns him. People remember his attitude to his mother's death, his failure to linger at her grave, his smoking. Aware that he is to die, all he can do is wonder at his acceptance of his fate. The bleak beauty of the prose evokes the apathy at the heart of this pioneering existentialist narrative which continues to unsettle.
• This is a weekly series in which Eileen Battersby revisits titles from the literary canon