Quarantine: A Novel

From its dramatic opening in which a trader lies dying in a tent while his caravan continues on to Jericho without him, to the confusing days following the death of Jesus, Crace's novel of forty days' "quarantine" in the wilderness startles, fascinates, and ultimately haunts. Readers who embrace a literal interpretation of the Bible may be offended by the premise and plot of this novel, in which Jesus and four other pilgrims seek spiritual enlightenment in separate caves in the bleak wilderness. Each, including Jesus, faces personal demons as s/he wrestles with solitude, starvation, and thirst. For those who regard events in the New Testament as symbolic, rather than literal, the novel offers a surprising new way of experiencing and interpreting the trials in the wilderness, the death and burial of Jesus, and ultimately the influence of Jesus on succeeding generations.Crace's descriptions of the natural world are breathtaking. Using vivid verbs, musical cadences, unique metaphors, and acutely perceived observations about man, nature, and the spirit, he brings the wilderness into sharp focus, often personifying nature and its creatures without a trace of romanticism. "The clouds came down to sniff the hills, to scratch their bellies on the thorns," "Clouds and lightning moved away, banging on their shields," and sounds of wind that "could be mistaken for the vast percussion of the storm-pressed, canvas billows of a ship" are among the hundreds of vibrant and unique images which bring nature to life and illustrate man's closeness to it. With a similar focus on men as humans within nature and the wilderness, he attempts to recreate the quarantine experience and man's desire to connect with a higher power. Jesus, like the other pilgrims, is human here, a man rooted in the real world of his day and subject to the same urges as other men. He is different from them, however, in his determination not to yield to privation as he seeks union with God through his visions and hallucinations. This is not a book that will appeal to everyone. Though Crace's purpose is not to debunk, he does challenge our understanding of what happened between the forty days in the wilderness and the resurrection and its significance. The language is stunning, the characters are fascinating, the imagery is unique, and the power of nature is overwhelming--but one's enjoyment of the book ultimately depends on one's willingness to consider alternative interpretations of some of the basic tenets of Christianity. Mary Whipple

Barry Lopez recently visited Boulder on his book tour, and mentioned that when he's not writing, he's reading Jim Crace and Russell Banks. He mentioned reading QUARANTINE in particular, and about Crace, Lopez said, "watch this guy." The Bible says that Jesus went into the desert for forty days, where he was tempted by Satan (Mark 1:12-13). "Go into the desert if you must, and fast," Crace writes in this imaginative tale of that forty-day retreat into the wilderness. "But do take care. For god is not alone up there, if god is there at all. But there are animals; and the devil is the fiercest of them all" (p. 158). Written, perhaps, from the desert's point of view, Crace's 245-page novel reveals that Jesus's wilderness "quarantine" would be "achieved without the comforts and temptations of clothing, food and water. He'd put his trust in god, as young men do. He would encounter god or die, that was the nose and tail of it. That's why he'd come. To talk directly to his god. To let his god provide the water and the food. Or let the devil do its work. It would be a test for all three of them" (p. 22). Crace's writing is so vivid that it allows us to experience Jesus's quarantine for ourselves. "No one had said how painful it would be," Crace writes. "How first, there would be the headaches and bad breath, weakness, fainting; or how the coating on the upper surface of his tongue would thicken day by day; or how his tongue would soon become stuck to the upper part of his mouth, held in place by gluey strings of hunger, so that he would mutter to himself or say his prayers as if his palate had been cleft at birth; or how his gums would bleed and his teeth become as loose as date stones" (p. 157)."They came to live like hermit bats, the proverbs said, for forty days, a quarantine of dayight fasting, solitude and prayer, in caves" (p. 11). In his fascinating novel, Crace introduces Jesus to other exiles, who had travelled into the Judean desert "mad with grief. Or shame. Or love. Or illnesses and visions. Mad enough to think that everything they did, no matter how vain or trivial, was of interest to their god. Mad enough to think that forty days of discomfort could put their world in order" (p. 12). Jesus's temptation arrives not in the form of a serpent or animal, but through the solicitations of a merchant, Musa. "For Jesus," Casey writes, "the merchant Musa and the devil were the same . . . he was a strong adversary for god" (pp. 154-55). Jesus knew that "angels and devils could not be told apart just by their looks," but as for Musa, "here was a devil then, sent to the wilderness, with death and fever as his friends, attended by four mad, unbelonging souls, to be adversaries to god . . . they'd come to tempt him from the precipice with their thin cries" (p. 112). Crace equates Musa's footprints to the footprints of "the burglar, the adulterer, the son who'd run away at night, the village sneak, the chicken thief" (p. 201).Cr

Jim Crace is one of the finest writers working in English today--each of his rather brief books manages to fashion vivid, tangible worlds in the sparest, most succint prose. Aside from his most recent work, the miraculous "Being Dead", this is his best effort, a hallucinatory trip to the wind-swept, barren wilderness of ancient Palestine. Though each of the seven human characters here is compelling and fully developed in his or her own right, it is the landscape--bleak, timeless, deadly--that is the star of this show. Crace has so fully researched and imagined this place that we come away feeling as if we, too, have been there, suffered through a most grueling and unusual quarantine that begins and ends with a miracle and is rife with dangers--seen and unseen--throughout. Much has been made of the portrayal of Jesus here. To be sure, this is not the sort of book that fundamenalist Christians will be clambering to buy. What we get is a young, naive, incredibly obstinate man who suffers unnecessarily (or so it seems), dies a gruesome death and then, in the book's final, deeply unsettling pages, walks away from the desert, even as his husk of a body lies in a tomb. What exactly is going on here? It's hard to tell--Crace is not a big one on spelling things out for the reader--but one can draw the conclusion that Jesus had to die in the desert both spiritually (as in the Gospels) AND physically before he could begin his mission. There are serious implications for theologians in all of this, but this general reader was more haunted by the imagery than troubled by Crace's unorthodox and truly weird tampering with tradition. Among the supporting cast, the most interesting characters are the two women--the infertile, intelligent Marta and the subserviant, pregnant Miri who, we are lead to believe, might become the famous Martha and Mary of St. John's Lazarus story (something to keep in mind while reading this book, I think.) The warm, deeply human bond that brings these women together is touching indeed, and adds context to the mystical, dream-like passages that leave the reader off-balance, in a world that's as unfamiliar to us as it is real. Crace is a genius, what more can one say, and this strange, upsetting, beautiful little novel deserves the attention of all serious readers.

This novel is definitely not for those who want all the nuances of a story spoonfed to them, and I suspect the complaints that _Quarantine_ is "boring" and "has no plot" stem from the attitude too many take toward reading books nowadays. _Quarantine_ is immensely rewarding, but it's not a airport rack thriller.While not exactly inspirational, and definitely morally ambiguous, the events that lead upto the last 20 pages or so are perfect; Crace's handling of what happens with Jesus and Musa after the former's "death," and the emancipation of Musa's wife and the woman he raped, are far superior to anything I have read in a long time. Although the prose is a bit dry at times, that actually turns to its advantage at the end, where it is all-important to be understated. I highly recommend this book.But unlike a previous reviewer, I didn't detect even a smidgen of stereotyping of Arab culture. I read that review prior to buying the book, and was fully prepared for some prejudicial characterization, but I couldn't find any whatsoever. All the characters in here are truly universal -- Miri's subservience to and concealed hatred of her husband, Musa's mercantilistic thinking and amorality, and so on. I would have no problem at all imagining Miri as a modern, oppressed Western housewife and Musa as a domineering, conceited middle manager. Just because not all the characters here are admirable doesn't mean they're stereotypes. Such accusations about books and movies usually have at least some merit, but for _Quarantine_ they're completely unjustified, and seem a bit paranoid, actually.