Once the safest, most prosperous place on earth, the United States has become sparsely populated and chaotically unstable. Across the country, families have traveled toward the one hope left: passage on a ship to Europe. As Franklin Lopez makes his way towards the ocean, he finds Margaret, a sick woman shunned to die in isolation. Tentatively, the two join forces, heading towards their future. With striking prose and a deep understanding of the American ethos, Jim Crace, one of our most consistently ambitious writers, creates in The Pesthouse a masterful tale of the human drive to endure.
The Pesthouse (Vintage)
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
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, naïve 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)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Most critics compared The Pesthouse to Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize?winning The Road (****1/2 Nov/Dec 2006). While The Pesthouse is equally devastating in its postapocalyptic vision, the novel, less spare in its sensory descriptions, contains a mordant wit and rounded female characters. Jim Crace, the author of eight previous novels (including the 2000 National Book Critics Circle Award?winning Being Dead), compellingly chronicles a reverse migration and abandoned moral codes while raising important questions about self-preservation, industrial expansion, and our responsibility toward others. A few quibbles: some critics cited stereotypical characters, and others noted that while compelling, Crace's subject matter has been covered in better novels.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
69 of 73 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
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.
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.
22 of 27 people found the following review helpful
By Patrick
Format:Hardcover
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.
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful
By Cipriano
Format:Hardcover
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.
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.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
2.0 out of 5 stars
Volumes of internal monologue that speak sentences
The obvious comparison is with McCarthy's The Road, and it isn't a favourable one. Crace writes beautiful prose, but he knows it, and he doesn't feel like he needs a plot. Read more
Published 2 months ago by G
3.0 out of 5 stars
Unique Style But Difficult to Understand
I read the first few chapters and simply couldn't understand the author's vernacular. Therefore, I had a hard time getting into the story and couldn't finish it. Read more
Published 6 months ago by G. Dill
2.0 out of 5 stars
Forgettable
It was okay, but not fantastic. The style was a little simplistic - as if it were written for young adults. Read more
Published 18 months ago by T. Dotts
5.0 out of 5 stars
not in-your-face post-apoc, very subtle
really cute lve story in the 4th or so generation after a post-apoc. reminded me of the oregon trail journey only this is west to east. Read more
Published on April 9, 2011 by apocalypse blonde
2.0 out of 5 stars
I didn't finish
At first I found the novel interesting, but even then I questioned what I was getting out of it since the characters were so flat. Read more
Published on August 24, 2010 by algo41
5.0 out of 5 stars
Read in one sitting
I spent a very special Saturday with this book. I won't go over the plot again-it's been explained to death up above-but I will praise Crace's simple yet absorbing prose and vivid... Read more
Published on July 12, 2010 by R Atherton
4.0 out of 5 stars
Everybody died at night in this America turned upside down
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... Read more
Published on April 4, 2010 by Cathy G. Cole
5.0 out of 5 stars
Bleak and chilling future America
Set in an undated future America, The Pesthouse is about two people trying to make their way to the east coast. Read more
Published on January 11, 2010 by kellyreaderofbooks
4.0 out of 5 stars
a kindlier version of 'the Road'
Crace never goes into exactly how the world came to be as it is in this futuristic look at america. The age seems to be a combination of 'Grapes of Wrath', 'the Road', and... Read more
Published on November 3, 2009 by clifford
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dystopian novel of true quality
The Pesthouse (Vintage) follows a series of memorable dystopian novels such as 1984, Brave New World and Jennifer Government. Read more
Published on September 11, 2009 by L. Bravim
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