A Plague Tale: Innocence

How killer rodents helped us see the light

- Jon Bailes

There’s a scene in A Plague Tale that’s truly a picture of innocence. Perhaps the only one. Two teens, highborn protagonist Amicia and poor thief Melie, work to liberate an abandoned castle from swarms of killer rats, guiding them into pits with flaming braziers. As Amicia strains to lever the metal contraptions, she imagines herself an Amazon warrior, and narrates a battle against invading hordes. Melie resists the charade – she’s the game’s modern conscience, cynical, wary of status – but then begins to embellish the fantasy herself. In that moment they forget who they are. They’re just two children playing.

Titles stapled together with a colon often feel unwieldy, but A Plague Tale justifies its subtitle. It’s the thematic glue that binds the adventure together, and makes it sticky. Yes, this is a tale of kids thrust into a diseased adult world, fighting to restore an innocence lost. But it’s also something darker, about how thin the veneer of innocence is, and how it may rest on stubborn blindness to injustice and suffering. Innocence, this tale suggests, isn’t so much a gift of childhood as of privilege, rendered hollow by an unseen human cost.

Amicia de Rune and her five-year-old brother Hugo, sheltered offspring of a 14th-century French lord, are ideal specimens to convey such ideas. Amicia is carefree and curious, treating life as an adventure, only complaining that she doesn’t see her parents much. Her mother, in particular, is occupied with Hugo, the boy afflicted with an unnamed condition that keeps him confined to his quarters.