The Pesthouse

I will skip all introductory preamble and move straight on to several opinionated statements ? The Pesthouse, by Jim Crace, is an absolutely superb novel. Best I've read in a long time! I loved it. I savoured, yet devoured it. I didn't want it to end, yet raced my way to its last page and I must conclude that anyone who thinks it worthy of less than five stars out of five is no friend of mine! There. With that out of the way... In this, the first novel by Crace I have ever read, post-apocalyptic America has been so long destroyed by some sort of un-named ecological disaster that the surviving population has reverted to a frontier, pioneering manner of life. Gone [and seemingly long-forgotten] is the age [our own] of automation and electricity. No cars or planes, no big buildings or mass communication. It is an America in shut-down mode, where a donkey is an extravagance. It is an inversion of the American Dream, a reversal of Manifest Destiny, and nearly a return to the Dark Ages. However, civilization's demise is not global, or so the inhabitants of Crace's America [and we readers] are led to believe. Legend has it that across the sea, in Europe, things are not so bad. Whatever has happened to America has not happened there. Europe is the new Promised Land, and hopeful Americans become pilgrims, making their way east where they believe they will board ships that will ferry them to their prosperous future. Toward this utopia, the Lopez brothers, Franklin and Jackson, are making their way. At a crucial point just outside Ferrytown, Franklin cannot go on, due to his bum knee. [Man, I could really relate to this guy, having a rickety knee myself!] Low on supplies, Jackson heads into Ferrytown to work in exchange for food, leaving Franklin to rest on a hillside, and vowing to return. But Jackson does not return. In the middle of the night, a landslide causes displaced gases from the lake to envelop the town, killing all the inhabitants, including Jackson. Don't let the first line of the book fool you [as it did, me]. "Everybody died at night," does not refer to the overall end-of-the-world state of things. It refers merely to this one isolated tragedy, which serves, among other things, as a catalyst for Franklin's meeting with Margaret. Ahh, red-haired Margaret. She has been abandoned by her family at the top of Franklin's hill, in a hut known as the pesthouse. It is a somber cabin where victims of the flux, a terrible disease, are left to die. Margaret is there, languishing. Because Jackson does not return as promised, Franklin seeks shelter in the pesthouse, and a friendship is now born which will endure the length of the novel, and beyond. Together they set out, their mutual ailments abating, toward the east. But what a journey awaits them! This will not be your average Boy Scout hike! The bulk of the novel is the chronicle of their journey, wherein they encounter peril after peril, and mutual pilgrims all along the way. Folks helpful, and folk

I suppose if I were a professional rather than amateur reviewer, I should first finish Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" before reviewing Crace's "Pesthouse". The truth is I started "The Road" some time ago but only made to p. 30 before I bored out. Granted, it was a dystopia and dystopias are supposed to be gloomy, but come on! McCarthy's book was a real wrist-slitter (at least as far as I got) whereas Crace's work grabbed me right at the opener and `never let me go'. And I say all that despite the fact the Crace seems to break the two main writing commandments I live by, yet somehow he makes it work. Commandment #1--Show, not tell. Crace is more Tell, not show. While terribly interesting all the way through, terribly thrilling it ain't. Commandment #2--Never describe feelings. Crace tells the story from inside his character's heads, and in third person no less. How are you supposed to get involved with the characters like that? C'mon, Jimbo! Ever heard of subtext??? Makes for a fun read, kind of like a literary puzzle. I think Crace pulls this story off, in spite of himself, with two things: 1) Beautiful, lyrical narrative writing. Take the opener: "Everybody died at night." Shades of Camus' "The Stranger" there. Or a few pages later, "Not sleeping was the ferryman, who, having heard the rain..." Felt like I was channeling Edgar Allen Poe for the rest of the chapter after that one. 2) Crace vividly describes a fallen America, and in doing so, teases the reader to figure out how it got that way. Normally I hate that. (See my review of PD James' "Children of Men") You can't just tell a story about the end of the world and say, `trust me'. I need a reason to believe it ended if only for context. But with Crace, I quit worrying about it. Actually found it was more fun to reverse-engineer his catastrophe rather than have him spell it out for me. BTW--Contrary to one reviewer I do NOT think it was a plague. I do think the return of bubonic plague was a result of what went wrong, but not the root cause. My guess is that we simply ran out of oil and somehow forgot to invent a new energy infrastructure before the end came. Everything dominoed after that until, somewhere around 2500 AD or so, we ended up with an ignorant, illiterate, primitive-survival-savvy society that was more akin to America of, say, 1830 than 2007. A corollary to the main teaser would be why was Europe spared? Or was it? Hmm... Anyway, those two things are why I gave him five stars. --Ejner Fulsang, author of "A Destiny of Fools" Aarhus Publishing 2007

Jim Crace takes more risks in his stories than most authors writing today. In THE PESTHOUSE he manages to create a love story with seeds in disease, death, futuristic semi-annihilation of America, and a reversal of the concept of immigration. And the primary reason he is able to succeed in his books (BEING DEAD, QUARANTINE, THE DEVIL'S LARDER, GENESIS, etc) is his uncanny gift of flowing poetic prose that can make even the most terrifying and horrendous sights and incidents an exciting literary experience. The time of this powerful novel is sometime in the future, a time when for some unstated reason the place called America has been reduced to 'junkle', the lands being destroyed by some form of disaster (? nuclear, defoliation, uncontrolled disease?) and all that remains of the once highly technologically advanced country is debris and starving people, all struggling to migrate to the East Coast (reverse pioneerism) to board a ship to Europe for the dreams of a better life. Disease and famine are rampant and one of the victims of the deadly disease 'flux' is Margaret, a plain woman approaching middle age without ever having a lover or caring partner: she is place in The Pesthouse on Butter Hill to die. At the same time two virile brothers, Jackson and Franklin, are migrating to the East Coast, but Franklin suffers a severe knee injury and is forced to let his brother go ahead without him. Franklin seeks refuge in the Pesthouse, finds Margaret near death, and despite the possibility of contagion, nurses her to health. As the completely shaved Margaret shows signs of improvement, the two agree to gather goods from Margaret's nearby hometown Ferrytown and begin the long journey to 'freedom and promise' on the East Coast. Ferrytown has succumbed to 'flux' and Franklin and Margaret burn the little village in an act of cremation of the inhabitants. Their trek East is disrupted by evil men who separate the two, enslaving Franklin and forcing Margaret to seek refuge with other terrified migrants, one of whom has a newborn grandchild whose father was captured into slavery with Franklin, and Margaret eventually becomes the little girl's guardian. There are extended stretches of incidents: Margaret and baby Bella take refuge in an Ark run by Baptists whose life is one without metals (the sign of the devil, read technological greed) but provide a socialist style living quarters for the winter months; Franklin is chained into slavery on work crews, one of the jobs being to excavate the buried evil metals discarded by the Baptists. Come Spring and by accident Margaret and Franklin reunite and alter their goal of sailing to Europe to opt for turning West to create a life of what America once was. Some readers may tire of the recent number of books about post-devastation America (Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD paints a similar concept), but Crace is able to make a rather grim novel one of very pure love. He also is able to conjure thoughts that make u

America the Beautiful in ruins, there are no cities, no skyscrapers in what has become a distinctly medieval landscape, travelers on foot and with laden carts, horses and donkeys replacing the frantic cacophony of a world reduced to the basic elements of survival. Knives, bows and arrows have replaced the stuttering menace of assault weapons, the steady roar of jets extinguished. Now weary folk trek eastward, toward the ocean where they hope to cross to Europe. Followed only by disease and want, superstition takes the place of science, the land demanding payment for its generosity, farmers valuable for their knowledge of the soil. In Ferrytown, the needs of travelers have bestowed a constant source of income for those industrious enough to build their town around ferrying and hostelry. Pestilence visits Ferrytown intermittently, the only recent victim thirty-year-old Margaret, whose own father died from the flux that now excoriates her every breath. Left to recover, or not, in the small, removed hut of the pesthouse, Margaret slumbers, fevered. Brothers Franklin and Jackson Lopez have left their home in the west at the behest of their widowed mother. The brothers are notable for their size, seen as giants compared to other men, their muscles and brawn valuable barter along the way. When Franklin's aching knee will no longer support their journey without rest, Jackson goes ahead to Ferrytown, where he finds respite and sustenance for the night. But fate has other plans for Ferrytown, a great looming upheaval of natural confluences. Meanwhile, discovering the ailing woman in the pesthouse, Franklin shelters with her, the two forging an unexpected alliance; together they will travel across a barren, mud-slogged landscape, the rich natural resources of the old America long extinct. On this extraordinary journey, Margaret and Franklin achieve a closeness that neither could imagine before they met, a joining of wit and will that is their only comfort as they confront the perils ahead. Civilization reduced to anarchy, menace is everywhere. Even the supposed safety of the Ark, where metal is anathema, exists partly through the fantasy that good intentions can prevail against force. Nearly lost to one another after being attacked by a violent band of bandits, Franklin and Margaret realize the extent of their isolation, savoring future intimacies while embracing a vision for the future. Crace's prose, while weighted and bleak, is filled with the nuances of hopeful beginnings, an appreciation for the simple, pure struggle for survival in a world informed by possibility. Franklin and Margaret are remarkable characters, putting me in mind of Margaret Atwood's stark prose, survivors who face the future and find it lacking, recreating instead the dreams of their forefathers, the pioneers who envisioned a new prosperity from the bounty of the earth. The Pesthouse is remarkable, beautiful and encouraging, life stripped to the essential, relieved of the cynici