Review by New York Times Review
IT must be human nature to want to imagine hell, and to want to describe it to those with less vivid imaginations. From van Eyck to Dante, from Jonathan Edwards to Jean-Paul Sartre, artists have been only too happy to tell us exactly how hot the flames will be, and how exquisite our tortures. But it's mostly in the past century that a new circle of hell has emerged, in narratives ranging from "Mad Max" to "The Twilight Zone" to Cormac McCarthy's novel "The Road" - and, now, "The Pesthouse." This updated descent into the inferno involves a road trip through the ruined wasteland the earth has become. Hell is other people, all right, but in these parched, futuristic landscapes, the devils are more likely Hell's Angels than Sartre's French neurotics. The whole planet is a toxic dump site, and people have reverted to behaviors so basic that the writer can skip the cultural details and take us straight to the heart of what it means to be human. In retrospect, it was only a matter of time before Jim Crace addressed the post-apocalyptic. He has always exhibited an uncanny gift for tapping into the horrors that wake us, heart pounding, in the middle of the night. He is fascinated by the extremes of existence, and he knows our demons by name: fear of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, fear of the body's betrayal, fear of our own past mistakes, fear of death in general and violent death in particular. The main characters of his best-known novel, "Being Dead," are the decomposing corpses of a couple murdered on a beach. By contrast, the couple in his new book are struggling to survive; what's decaying is the world around them. Like several of Crace's books, "The Pesthouse" begins in "the small times of the morning." The incantatory opening paragraphs detail the grim efficiency with which a cloud of poisonous vapors dispatches the sleeping and the sleepless alike, the residents of Ferrytown and travelers camping there on their pilgrimage eastward to the sea, where they hope to save themselves by embarking for Europe. As the chapter assumes a high rhetorical mode, the book begins to suggest a fun-house-mirror distortion of Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," which concludes with travelers like Much-Afraid, the daughter of Mr. Despondency, singing as she crosses the river to salvation. But already we sense the journey will be a lot rockier for Crace's characters, and there won't be a lot of singing. It's a tribute to Crace's skills that we so rapidly get our bearings in a radically altered landscape. It's the future, it's America, something cataclysmic has occurred. But it's hard to know just what, since history is among the things that have fallen by the wayside, along with literacy, modern science (pediatric medicine dictates strapping a pigeon to a sick child's feet until the illness enters the pigeon) and 20th-century notions of gender equality: "That was how the duties of the world had been assigned. Crying for the women. Spitting for the men." The social Darwinism of the early 21st century has been replaced by one that's considerably redder in tooth and claw. But still, love is love. Franklin and Margaret, who narrowly escape the latest toxic event, turn out to be made for each other. Franklin is a good-hearted fellow with a bad knee and an older brother whose bossiness he relies on. Margaret is a redhead, with all that implies, even in the barbaric future. Worse, she is desperately ill with a dreaded plague whose victims have their body hair removed and are then taken to recover or die in the isolated cabin of the novel's title. That's where Franklin and Margaret - or Pigeon and Mags, the nicknames they will adopt - find each other in the dying-planet version of the boy-girl meet, and where loneliness and kindness triumph over the fear of disease. As soon as it becomes clear that Margaret is going to live, the urgency of the lemminglike eastward migration propels the pair onto the highway, where they are assaulted by the sort of murdering, raping, greedy bad boys we may have met in other dystopias. My favorite section of the book concerns cult members who believe that hands were created to do the Devil's work and whose abhorrence of anything metal (and whose scrutiny of newcomers) evokes the concentrated focus of airport security screeners. Margaret enjoys a thrillingly creepy idyll among the group, whose leaders, the Helpless Gentlemen, aka the Finger Baptists, are so pure that their hands have withered from disuse. The only problem with this section is that it made me wish the rest of the novel were as strange, and as good. In the British press, there's been some titillated nail-biting about how the book will be received in this country, where it is set: Let's poke the big bully with a stick and see how he reacts. How surprising of British critics to so underestimate Crace, who is not a naïve writer, who has surely noticed the alarming ratio of (to quote William Blake) "dark Satanic mills" to "green and pleasant land" in his own country, and who has doubtless observed that, fair or not, ecological catastrophes rarely happen to the people who cause them. I'd imagine that what made the book so satisfying to write was not the chance to punish America for its sins against nature, but rather the appeal of making the future reverse the past in the great eastward migration that Crace charts. So it wasn't any affront to my delicate, jingoistic sensibilities that kept making me put down "The Pesthouse." Days would pass before I picked it up again to learn Pigeon and Mags's fate. I hoped things would work out for them, but I didn't much need to know. Crace can write amazingly well, as he did in "Being Dead." When he's on, as he often is here, the results are stellar. But that highway across the ravaged future has been traversed so frequently that keeping us on course requires a level of invention as high as the one that gives the Finger Baptists their eerie fascination. We've witnessed too many scenes in which our de-evolved descendants puzzle out the use of some low-tech archaeological relic - here, a pair of binoculars. And we're too easily distracted by minor plot holes and slight tears in the web of illusion. I stalled each time characters acted counterintuitively in a world where survival depends on instinct, and again when I'd wonder why American primitives should sound like refugees from a Thomas Hardy novel. My mother-in-law, who was a fountain of folk wisdom, used to say that World War III would be fought with sticks and stones. When she said it, I believed her. But it wasn't like reading Dante. You can't help wanting more from art, and from Jim Crace. You can't help wanting something new, something beyond an inspired melding of science fiction and the horrors we ourselves dream up in the dead of night. It's disorienting and a little dispiriting - like some sort of odd déjà vu - to read about the hell of the future and feel that we've been there before. Hell is still other people, but the devils are more likely Hell's Angels than Sartre's French neurotics. Francine Prose's most recent book is "Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them," which has just been published in paperback.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Crace's latest novel takes place at some indeterminate point in the future in which America has been reduced to a wasteland. It is never explained whether this is the result of some apocalyptic event or simply the decline of a degenerate civilization, but the result is the same: a lawless, technologically bereft society amid a poisoned land. Embattled survivors are trickling east, following rumor of ships that will take them, in a reversal of America's long lost promise, across the sea to a brighter future. Two such travelers, Margaret and Franklin, meet in sickness, endure nightmarish perils, and fall in love on their journey to the shore. Crace shines when depicting scenes of desolation--the opener, in which a heavy rainstorm sets off a chain reaction that kills an entire town in its sleep, is particularly haunting--but strangely this winds up more an innocuous love story than a revelatory survival saga. Inevitable comparisons to Cormac McCarthy's The Road will arise, and although this is less potent, it offers no less portent. --Ian Chipman Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this postapocalyptic picaresque from Whitbread-winner Crace (for Quarantine), America has regressed to medieval conditions. After a forgotten eco-reaction in the distant past, the U.S. government, economy and society have collapsed. The illiterate inhabitants ride horses, fight with bows and swords and scratch a meager living from farming and fishing. But with crop yields and fish runs mysteriously dwindling, most are trekking to the Atlantic coast to take ships to the promised land of Europe, gawking along the way at the ruins of freeways and machinery yards, which seem the wasteful excesses of giants. Heading east, naive farm boy Franklin teams up with Margaret, a recovering victim of the mysterious "flux" whose shaven head (mark of the unclean) causes passersby to shun her. Their love blossoms amid misadventures in an anarchic landscape: Franklin is abducted by slave-traders; Margaret falls in with a religious sect that bans metal and deplores manual labor, symbolically repudiating America's traditional cult of progress, technology and industriousness (masculinity takes some hits, too). Crace's ninth novel leaves the U.S. impoverished, backward, fearful and abandoned by history. Less crushing than Cormac McCarthy's The Road and less over-the-top than Matthew Sharpe's Jamestown (to name two recent postapocalyptos), Crace's fable is an engrossing, if not completely convincing, outline of the shape of things to come. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In this thoughtful and exciting post-apocalyptic tale, a man and a woman battle the elements and the forces of savage humanity to find a safe haven in a dying world. In America, a strange accident involving a landslide and released gases trapped at the bottom of a lake wipes out the population of coastal Ferrytown overnight. The sole survivors are Margaret, who had been taken to a "pesthouse" outside of town to recover or die from "flux," and the injured Franklin, left by his brother as they headed toward Ferrytown to board a ship bound for Europe and a better life. A practical, unmarried loner, Margaret teams with the younger Franklin, an immature but gentle giant, as they visit the remains of Ferrytown and then strike out for another port. They become separated when "rustlers" kidnap Franklin and leave the presumably contagious Margaret behind. Months later, the two are reunited and decide to head inland to begin a new life. Crace (Being Dead), an award-winning British writer who should be more widely appreciated, manages to give depth and complexity to characters in a post-literate society who are practically nonverbal. With the popularity of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, one hopes that there will be more interest in Crace's latest effort. Recommended for all collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/07.]-Jim Coan, SUNY Coll. at Oneonta (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A powerful but subtly rendered novel about the choices people make when there seem to be no choices. The latest from Britain's Crace (Genesis, 2003, etc.) will likely draw comparison with Cormac McCarthy's The Road, as both concern love's salvation in a ravaged world on the brink of extinction. Crace sets his plot within an earlier stage of an American apocalypse, a time when most of the assurances of civilization within society have disappeared, even as there remains widespread hope of escape. Whereas pilgrims and pioneers once headed west for a better life, across the ocean to a New World and then across the country in the spirit of Manifest Destiny, the tide of history has now shifted back east. With America having reverted to a lawless, pre-industrial state, its cities and industries gone and its landscape largely a cesspool of environmental poison, rumors float throughout the sparsely populated countryside that ships will carry anyone who dares an arduous journey to a better world across the ocean. Among those attempting the pilgrimage are Jackson Lopez and his younger brother Franklin, both giants compared to most of their countrymen. The brothers find their journey to the coast stalled when Franklin starts limping near the settlement of Ferrytown. While Jackson searches for food, Franklin stumbles upon the titular "Pesthouse," where one of the community's daughters has been quarantined with "the flux," a plague that threatens to kill anyone who comes in contact with it. All this may sound grim, but Crace more than once refers to his story as a "fairy tale," and the relationship that the beautiful, innocent Margaret develops with the younger, equally innocent Franklin anticipates what must pass in this desolate world for a happy ending. Issues of family (blood or formed), religious faith, fate and the refusal to submit to it enrich an engrossing novel that may be the richest and most ambitious of the renowned author's career. A novel that finds redemptive possibility where going forward, going backward and staying put seem equally perilous. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
