Customer Reviews

The Pesthouse (Vintage)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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 cynicism of greed. Luan Gaines/2007.

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 folks not so helpful.
And bandits aplenty, none of which are helpful!

Quite suddenly, Margaret and Franklin are separated, and Crace chooses to follow Margaret's continued quest, which is now no longer involved with merely reaching the ocean, but with a desired reunion.
She wants to find and/or rescue her Franklin. She becomes, for me as a reader, a very convincing heroine, someone I grew to love and admire for her courage and determination, and dang-it-all red-haired feistiness!
What a holy terror she is, at times!
And one of the main reasons is because, along the way, Margaret has become a mother to a child.
No, it is not what you think. The child is unintentionally adopted, along the way. Margaret is fighting not only for her own freedom and survival but also for her child, which she renames Jackie, in memory of Jackson.
Don't mess with a mother!
The mother's going to win.
The mother is going to get what is needed.

This was one of the most rollicking, gut-searing, adventurous, well-paced, un-put-downable, well-written, ending-redeeming, simultaneously scenically stark and beautiful novels I have ever read. Really, I loved it that much.
I agree with the Globe and Mail reviewer Joan Thomas, who called Crace's style "just one draft away from blank verse."
It is truly poetic. Mythic, even.

Some may find it an authorial inconsistency that towards the end, the travelers [now making their way west] encounter a landscape with "fewer dangers, warmer nights, softer going in a season that was opening up rather than closing down. It even decorated the way with early flowers."
Early flowers?
What happened to the toxic soil and the barrenness and the despair?
It is overcome, in this novel, by the persistence of life and survival.
No inconsistency at all.
In the end, Franklin and Margaret are called upon to make some truly brave decisions, on behalf of the purest kind of love for one another.
And they do.
There are always flowers, somewhere.

This was my first exposure to Mr. Crace's work, and I was a bit disappointed. This dystopian novel follows the fortunes of two people, Franklin and Margaret, who are thrown together against fate in an America apparently devastated by pollution and war, a land where everyone is either slogging their way eastward across the ravaged land to seek ocean passage to Europe, or preying upon the would-be emigrants. While there were a few inventive takes on post-cataclysmic America, I found the story's development to be slow, the writing sometimes tedious, the dissertations on the characters' thinking in various situations way too wordy, and the lapses in logic often implausible. As reviewer Francine Prose wrote of Franklin and Margaret in a NY Times review, "I hoped things would work out for them, but I didn't much need to know." Given the author's reputation, I hung in there even though this was an easy book to set aside. At the end of it all, I felt it was rather a poor investment of my time.

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 us look around our earth and visualize what could happen should we elect not to change our current course of global and human abuse. His story also gives a quiet but healthy pause for us to feel the other side of the immigration dilemma: the remaining people are struggling to leave their land of hardship for the Gilead of Europe. And overriding all other aspects of this exceptional novel is Jim Crace's grace with prose. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, July 07

One thing that's key to understand going into this book is that it's all about tone and feeling, and not about details or logic. To a certain extent, the reader just has to accept the world that Crace has presented, and not try to figure it out. This was a big struggle for me as I started it, since most stories (be they books or films) set in a post-apocalyptic world either explain how the world got that way, or use the mystery of the "why/how" as a major plot device. Here, Crace simply posits a greatly depopulated America some two-hundred years in the future (according to an interview I read) which has been thrust back into a kind of early 19th-century existence, only with almost no technology and no written language. There are intimations of a widespread plague, and some kind of permanent crop failures, but just hints, nothing concrete. Elements of this make no sense at all -- especially the loss of technology and writing -- but you just have to go with it.

The book follows two people through this landscape where there is no government or rule of law beyond rudimentary local customs and practices. Franklin is a young man from somewhere out West, who has left the homestead to make his way to the East Coast, where there are apparently ships that take people to a better life in Europe. Margaret is a 30ish spinster whose family, according to custom, kicks her out of their fairly prosperous town when she manifests symptoms of the plague. The two are thrust together by fate, and embark on a perilous quest eastward for a better life. Their journey is filled with the expected trials and tribulations (bandits, betrayal, slavers, separation, physical hardship, etc.), but the story is told in such a way that it is clear the two will end up back together by the end. One flaw in the book is that Franklin is left far too underdeveloped to really engage the reader as a co-protagonist, especially in comparison with Margaret, who is fully realized.

In that sense, the story might be considered too gentle. Yes, bad things happen to Franklin and Margaret, but this version of America isn't quite menacing enough to invest the story with any real suspense over the outcome. Indeed, at times, it's hard to really understand why people want to leave and head for the ships. Large swathes of the country they pass through seem perfectly fine, with farming and animal husbandry. And indeed, this greatly undermines the story's conclusion, which I won't give away, but is not exactly surprising. Ultimately, Crace seems to have written this book as a way of expressing optimism. it's definitely worth reading for his beautiful command of language and unexpected turns of phrase, especially when it comes to physical description, just don't expect it to hold together as a dystopian vision of the future.

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

I started this novel with a growing excitement over the delicious way this man uses words. I was tired of the entire thing, and speed-reading parts of it, by chapter four.

Crace is a masterful wordsmith (parts of this book should be read aloud, just to enjoy the poetic flow of language), but the truth is that his oblique style and his sheer wordiness made me irritable after a bit. "Get on with it," is what I wanted to tell the author. "And your point is?" (As for the "plain prose" the Washington Post Book World reviewer mentions above, I beg to differ. This is prose manipulated and woven *around* the events it describes.)

In fiction writing, the art lies as much in the leaving out as the leaving in. This certainly doesn't preclude wordiness (think of Faulkner -- wordy, yet leaving you wanting more), but I think that Crace fell in love with his own voice in The Pesthouse. Furthermore, the plot is not interesting enough to look past the author's overbearing voice. The reader is never drawn into the story.

The first three or four pages (heck, the first chapter!) can be summed up in one sentence: a landslide fell into a stagnant lake and raised a gas cloud that killed people and livestock. That's fine for a chapter, but the whole novel is like that. I can't recommend this book, but have given it three stars anyway because Crace is truly an artful writer.

Crace's ninth book, this one is as unusual and distinctive as his earlier works.

Pesthouse is set in a future America, a place much like the Wild West, with no government, history, or industry. Travel is by horseback or cart. Unspecified plagues and toxic disasters have created a landscape of "junkles," large cities of rubble, and small towns and groups of farmsteads where the inhabitants fend off attacks from lawless robbers and slavers.

Large areas are barren and unsuitable for habitation. Life has gotten so dangerous that many are leaving for the East Coast, to try to find passage aboard a ship east--to a dream world without lawlessness and disease, a land of fabled safety and abundance.

Franklin and his older brother Jackson are traveling east and arrive at Ferrytown, where they plan to cross a large river when Franklin's knee finally gives out, and he begs his brother for a chance to rest. Jackson goes into Ferrytown where he dies during the night, along with all of the town's inhabitants, due to a release of poisonous gas from the nearby lake bottom as the result of a landslide.

Margaret has been taken up the hill from the town to the remote pesthouse, where she was left to die (or possibly survive) the "flux," after having all her body hair removed. There she meets Franklin, who helps her down to the town a few days later where they find a town full of corpses. They flee by a secret bridge over the river, and make their way east, meeting up with other travelers. They are separated when Franklin is captured by slavers. Margaret accompanies the Boses, a rather self-centered couple traveling with their granddaughter, further east in the rather hopeless task of finding him and the Boses' son.

This modern fairy tale includes an odd religious sect where Margaret and the child find winter shelter, the Fingerless Baptists, who abhor all metal, and make everyone abandon all things made of metal, whether it be belt buckles, pots, knives, or jewelry--because it is the cause of war and greed. This metal attracts the slavers, and there is a possibility of Franklin and Margaret reuniting. Margaret hears that the sailing ships from the east will only take attractive single women of child-bearing age, and young men with skills; and only very, very wealthy families.

Crace's writing is unusual; the dialogue is odd, very post apocalyptic. The landscape is described intensely, and the odd communities and the casual hostility towards strangers are unnerving. Margaret and Franklin, for all their strangeness, are people we care about.

Armchair Interviews says: This would make a very intriguing book club selection.

In the fishing village along the riverbank-- a place called Ferrytown that likes to charge exorbitant fees to any stranger traveling through-- Margaret is showing definite signs of sickness. Her head is shaved, and she is taken to a small stone cottage where she is left to recover... or to die. She is found by a young man named Franklin, and together they begin a long journey through an America laid waste by this disease they call the flux. Margaret and Franklin will be traveling through an America reduced to medieval methods of living where everyone hopes to make it to the East Coast to pay for passage on a ship bound for Europe-- the Promised Land. The couple will have many adventures along the way.

Crace swiftly sets the tone of his book and makes his readers uneasy in the prologue: "This used to be America, this river crossing in the ten-month stretch of land, this sea-to-sea. It used to be the safest place on earth." Franklin is young and impulsive, which soon leads to trouble. Margaret is older and used to staying beneath the radar. She is the more observant and adaptable one. As they pass the rusted-out hulks of factories and the weed-choked arteries of disused highways, Crace leads us further and further away from our traditional American values of progress, technology and industriousness.

It is an engrossing journey, but one that I never completely believed. Although I liked the characters of Margaret and Franklin, and I found Crace's view of an America forgotten by history to be quite interesting, I felt as though I were being held at a distance... as though I had the flux. If not for that No Man's Land between the characters and me, I would rate this book even higher. Unfortunately, this lover of dystopian fiction felt a bit quarantined.

Set in an undated future America, The Pesthouse is about two people trying to make their way to the east coast. The America we currently know is long gone; replaced by a land with no government, technology, or education. People are living much as they did in the dark ages; and nearly all history as been lost.

People in this new America have been hearing rumors for several years that at the east coast there are sailing ships that will take them to Europe, to a new life. So, many Americans have left their homesteads and small, hard-scrabble towns to make their way to the unknown East. The two main characters--Margaret and Franklin--meet by chance, and throw their lot in together to attempt the journey.

Although the future America does play a huge role in the book, for me the main theme was more about hope; and what people will do when nearly all their chances are gone. The book reminded me of what some immigrants in third-world countries must imagine when they picture the US, only to find that the reality may be different. I liked how Crace casually put in little details that were at the same time so chilling: describing how the travelers come across a field of rusted metal, which at one time was maybe a factory or airport (although the characters have no idea what it might have been). Or describing an old interstate highway, which to the travelers is almost incomprehensible: they wonder why the "ancestors" needed such a big road, when four teams of horses abreast could easily fit across the road. These little details make the book all the more horrific for the characters' ignorance.