The Pesthouse

I am a big fan of Jim Crace and treat his novels like a warm blanket, although his subjects are not always easy. I have had this one on the shelf for some time saving it for a time when his wonderful prose was just what I needed. In the Pesthouse he takes us to a regressing America, where 'People were becoming scarce. America was emptying.' This is a novel of a rural America, there are highwaymen and human dangers but little sense of wild animals. Occasionally a relic of the former industrial America is stumbled upon. He writes with poetic sentences that are never a 'difficult' read, they flow. Jim Crace's characters are characters you know, they are people who doubt themselves, who are awkward and lonely. He writes affectionately about show more these people and understands their stories. The novel has a sense of the wild west, a sense of the medieval and a sense of the future, it is an excellent read. show less

For the most part I don’t like giving bad reviews. Sure there are books that deserve it, books that are all the craze and might’ve been written by a middle schooler (Fifty Shades…, I’m looking at you). But then there are books that are “written well” but lack any semblance of plot, character development, conflict, setting, joy, pain, life. I hate to group this sort of book with those I previously mentioned, but the truth is, this “well written book” is as difficult to read as the one that should be packing material.

The Pesthouse lacks everything a novel needs with the exception of well-orchestrated sentences. The story, what little bit of it there is, is told in the most clinical fashion; it was more like reading a show more psychologist’s report of the incidents than reading a novel. The characters were drab and unbelievable—they wouldn’t survive a day in this post-apocalyptic world. The dialogue was painful—why has the “end of the world” reverted the speech of people to Pioneer-speak? In short, I recognize that Jim Crace can write a sentence, but that doesn’t keep The Pesthouse from being extremely boring.

The best thing about this book is the cover of the hardback edition. I love this cover. Love it. It’s simple, but so elegant. The texture of the cover is unique, a very dull, old-fashioned paper with raised glossy print. The typeface is clear, demanding but not overpowering. The black and white imagery stands out in its simplicity. It is a wonderful book to hold and to gaze at; unfortunately, I wish I would’ve left it on my shelf unread, because despite its beauty, I now know of the great dissatisfaction that resides between its handsome covers.

Beautiful Cover Intriguing Synopsis ≠ Guaranteed Enjoyable Read show less

This is more like it. What a fabulous writer. The prose through-out this gem of a novel makes reading a pure pleasure. The magic of the prose transports you straight through the pages into the future. Just savour his writing:

“Why does sea-water taste the way it does?”….
“There’s salt in tears, that’s why. The ocean’s one great weeping eye. On clear days, we can see the curve of it.”

It is a post-apocalyptic era in America - although the actual nature of the disaster and the time line are left to the reader's imagination. Life as we know it no longer exists and the characters are faced with a dangerous, lawless and destroyed landscape. Everywhere, reminders of the old America remain. The inhabitants live in fear of each show more other with one motivation – to escape America. To do this, they need to reach the coast and board ships - away from the pandemonium. The result is a society of refugees, fleeing their lives for an unknown promised land over the sea.

Crace develops his characters, Franklin and Margaret, after they meet in the Pesthouse, where Margaret is sent after developing the 'Flux', making her much like the Black Plague victims of the past. These two likeable characters make their journey together. Despite desparate circumstances and the inevitable traumas, Crace gives his characters a sense of grace, optimism, and finally their combined epiphanies, which creates a sense of peace and closure to the plot. He explores themes of religiosity, with the ‘Ark’ community and the Finger Baptists, who believe that all things metal are related to evil and the ‘bad old days’. This is the most obvious satirical development in the book, although it is not over-played and falls short of parodying the religiosity and fevour of more ardent American religious sects – a theme he could well have expanded (if he did not want to sell to an American market maybe).

In fact, this book was advertised by Amazon before publication with a title ‘Useless America’, which may have reflected a more derogatory commentary on American culture today. Yet his book provides no hard-hitting criticisms, no dark corners, but rather creates an almost old-fashioned, medieval feel to it’s plot. There is a return to country-life with its more simple devices, such are bows and arrows, cobbling, net-making and foraging for food. Basic survival skills are the education of the population.

I found this book uplifting, beautiful and inspiring. I would love to read it again. show less

I really enjoyed this story of an apocalyptic America in which Margaret, a woman who recovered from the deadly disease called flux, and Franklin, a large man with a disabling knee injury, knew that they had to flee east to escape America by ship without even knowing what that would entail. I found both of their stories intriguing in that what happened to each seemed unique and unpredictable. The writing was very beautiful. I am a fan of this author and would gladly read more of his works.

If I could write, I’d want to write like Jim Crace. From the first moment I first discovered his The Gift of Stones he entered my list of ‘favourite authors’ alongside Graham Swift, Heinrich Böll, Iain M Banks, Juan José Saer and very few others. The kind of writer you check the shelves for every single time you enter a bookshop; then when you buy the latest book you leave it unopened a while, savouring the anticipation, fearing that once you’ve read it there’ll be no more Jim Crace to discover unless he writes another; and the day may come when he won’t. He’s already hinted that, though thankfully it now seems that two more are in the pipeline.

The Pesthouse is not his masterpiece (see Arcadia for that) but it is solid show more reliable Crace. Reading it I was in familiar territory. First, it reminded me of Signals of Distress though I can’t say why other than a feeling about the attitudes portrayed. Then it recalled The Gift of Stones and it is, in a sense, its mirror image, evoking a world that is regressing. Later again I felt stirrings of Quarantine with the trek across the wilderness and Being Dead with all the death and decomposition. That’s the thing about Crace; his books may be all about different things but they’re fashioned from the same tools. His sentences are short and poetic. His characters are lonely people, inhabiting slightly surreal but still recognisable worlds. There is an overarching misanthropy, tempered by great affection for individual characters.

Crace described Pesthouse as follows:

The novel provides America not with a science fiction future but with something that it has always wanted and lacked – a medieval “past”, an ancient European experience.

In some ways we’ve been there many times before in science fiction, and also in westerns. It’s the post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max inhabited by the grubby frontier people of High Plains Drifter but without any heroic ‘man-with-no-name’ to take revenge on wrong-doers. This is a western told in the European style. Cormac McCarthy came close in The Border Trilogy but ultimately Crace’s characters, timid, fearful and chaste, strike me as most believable. show less

Crace's novel The Pesthouse is a love story set against the backdrop of an America centuries in the future, long after some calamity has wiped away our technological culture and the nation-state known as the United States. What ancestral memory remains is shroulded in legend and myth. America has become a thinly-populated land ravaged by disease and prowled by bands of brutal men in search of plunder, whether in material form such as valuable metal objects or in human form as women to be raped and young men to be enslaved.

Amidst this grim setting, two young people, a woman named Margaret, consigned to a pesthouse as she suffers from a malady resembling the plague, and a younger man named Franklin, separated from his brother in their show more journey to the Atlantic coast and the ships bound for Europe, meet and become companiions and platonic lovers. Franklin and Margaret are torn apart when they are set upon by a band of thieves and slavers. After a hard winter, they are reunited. Margaret has "adopted" a baby girl left in her custody, another love story.

They learn a hard truth upon reaching the coast and then turn back to build new lives as a family in the interior of America. Despite the violence and squalor Crace depicts in the novel, there are also passages of lyrical beauty describing the land, moments of tenderness and sweet humor among the family, and episodes in which compassion and empathy prevail over the savagery of a land of hardness and danger. This wild and harsh America of the future is still a land that can inspire hope in those restless adventurers willing to push out toward the horizon. show less

I came to think of this book as more of a love story than anything else. It is the story of Margaret and Franklin (her 'Pigeon') — a man who finds her in the Pesthouse of the title. It is set in a post-apocalyptic America although the nature of what caused the social collapse is unclear. We meet very few characters in the story who seem to be carrying on as normal. There is, for example, the farmer who allows Margaret a little milk for the child. The book is dominated by families moving with their possessions towards the coast from where they hope to sail to some unstated destination. Other are those who feed on them - Margaret's own Ferrytown lives by the tolls its people charge the travellers to cross the river. At the port the show more travellers fall prey to yet more townspeople waiting to demand a high price for what the travellers need. Sailors and prostitutes play their part. Bands of robbers roam the country on horseback, raping, killing, enslaving and stealing. Margaret and the child spend a winter in a Baptist stronghold which provides food, warmth and shelter at a price. Because of the partnership of Margaret and Franklin I found the story less bleak than Cormac McCarthy's "The Road". show less