The Pesthouse [Paperback]

This is a well-written novel with a lot of interesting ideas, scenes, and well-drawn characters. I read it avidly, enjoyed it, but without genuinely caring for the fortunes of the two main characters as they searched for a better life elsewhere. It has been compared with Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" as both deal with a pair of characters, bound together by love, travelling through post-apocalyptic lands in search of better fortune. Having read "The Road" immediately before this, I feel this is by far the lesser work and, in particular, it fails on two levels. The first is that the setting is unconvincing. This is supposed to be a post-technological future version of America, descended from some undisclosed apocalyptic catastrophe. However, there is nothing to convince the reader that things are actually all that wrong with the world. There's plenty to eat, animal and plant life abounds, and there are plenty of people around. So why no government, technology, education or information, etc? Seems things are OK on one side of a river and a lawless jungle on the other. The reader is at a loss to work out why and it's hard to accept it. Put simply the world of the Pesthouse is not a convincing one. The second problem is that there is something in the writing that makes you feel that the dangers faced by the protagonists are superficial and there is little doubt cast in the reader's mind that they will prevail. Compare this to "The Road": that novel's unrelenting bleakness, its horrificly godless world of death is totally convincing; and its ability to conjure an absolute dread of reading on - made even worse by the father's desperate and primal drive to simply keep his beloved son alive (to "carry the fire") in a dying world where the handful of surviving men and women are reduced to starving lunatics, killing and eating each other - is stunning. In comparison, this doesn't really hit the spot.

Jim Crace is an orderly, methodical writer (his friend Will Self said: "I wouldn't dream of saying that Jim's study demonstrates anal retention, but his marker pens are colour-coded and the distance between his keyboard and chair is painstakingly measured out"), so it's a surprise that the wait for his new novel, The Pesthouse, doubled the usual metronomic two-year gap between his books. It had better be good.

In fact, it had better be better than Cormac McCarthy's recently lauded The Road, because superficially the two have a lot in common. Both are set in a post-apocalyptic America, with straggling survivors battling against the collapse of civilisation and doing their best to evade marauding bandits. Like McCarthy's unnamed man and boy, the characters in The Pesthouse are heading for the coast, where they hope for... what? "We go. We carry on. That's what we have to do."

But where McCarthy produced an immersive, devastating fable, Crace has set his sights wider: and lighter. There are some threats in his story, but few real moments of terror, and his world is more colourful, because his language is too. Anyone who has read Crace before will know what to expect: a rhythmic and mythic prose, full of off-kilter but just-so detail. Dawn is "at the very moment that the owl became the cock;" seagulls are "stocky, busy, labouring, their bony wings weighted at the tips with black;" the ocean is "one great weeping eye. On clear days, we can see the curve of it."

One difficulty with this rich style is that often the drama, emotion or other engine of the story can be blocked out by it. You are so conscious of the beauty of the words that they stay on the surface of your mind without always sinking in. And sure enough, Crace's tale of Franklin, big and shy (and a bit of a muddler, like his earlier `heroes' Aymer Smith and Felix Dern), and Margaret, left by her family as a victim of plague (or "the flux"), to begin with lacks weight, and for the first half or so the book meanders along with going anywhere much. The feel is not particularly American, and more like a straightforward medieval setting than a future dystopia, or the sort of parallel world Crace has conjured before in Arcadia or Six (which, like The Pesthouse, showed us how well he writes about cities). Occasionally though, the glimpses of an industrial past do cut through and when they do, they work remarkably well:

"Colossal devastated wheels and iron machines, too large for human hands, stood at the perimeter of the semicircle, as if they had been dumped by long-retreated glaciers and had no purpose now other than to age. Hardly anything grew amid the waste. The earth was poisoned, probably. Twisted rods of steel protruded from the masonry. Discarded shafts and metal planks, too heavy to pull aside even, blocked their paths."

And it's around the halfway point that the story really begins to gather itself. Franklin and Margaret face separation, rape, death, and encounter a ripely painted series of characters. Allegories rise up reminding us not only of America's recent past but our own: immigration, prejudice, slavery, the scattering forms of family life. Crace even stops to have fun with some (literally) ineffectual religious cult members. By the time we reach the coast, he has fashioned most of all a remarkable love story out of the unlikeliest elements. And by the end it is moving and elegiac, altogether a warming and compassionate thing, and easily Crace's best book since Being Dead or even Quarantine.

'The Pesthouse' is packed with all the rich trace elements you would expect from a work by Jim Crace. Few writers have the courage let alone the ability to effortlessly surf the waves of time, reality and imagination with such grace as this writer does. Pesthouse sees the creation of yet another dreamed up world, eerily familiar, astonishingly real but surprisingly different. We do not need to know how the once great America has plunged into medieval torpor. We need only savour the sublime narrative that describes this uncertain and often cruel future, punctuated by two of Crace's most vibrant characters to date - the indomitable 'Red' Margaret and lumbering, bashful Franklin Lopez. Throughout their struggle for survival and a better tomorrow, theirs becomes a love that proves to be remarkably tender, enduring and real. With Pesthouse, Crace has created his most fascinating vista yet and, as always, he invites you in to fill the tantalizing gaps he leaves behind.