Book: The Pesthouse by Jim Crace
Rating: 10/10
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 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.
