The Pesthouse (Vintage) (Paperback)

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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.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by John Crowley

Jim Crace is a writer about plain things, but he writes about them in a way that's both startling and subtle, a shimmering surface over still depths. His novel Being Dead was largely the chronicle of the dissolution and decay of two dead people, murdered on a lonely beach during sex. They rot away, eaten by bugs and birds -- and yet those bugs and birds, though they behave much like the ones we know, are all invented by Crace. And every few pages the gentle style falls unmistakably into iambic pentameter. It's a book as strange as it is successful.

The Pesthouse is written on a larger scale, in a world quite different from ours yet one to which ours gives birth: not only because the book is set sometime long in the future, but because its profoundest undercurrents could only have arisen in the world we live in now.

In his America of the future, there is no technological society, no power but muscle and water and fire, no money, no government, no law. There seem to be not very many people. The America we live in is a dim memory -- a few ancient coins, a bit of lore, some ruins ("the junkle"), mostly an emptiness. People are largely on the move, trying to reach the coast and the ships that they have heard will take them away from America to a better place on the other side, where there will be work and safety and some nameless human salvation.

Franklin and his brother Jackson are among the hopeful emigres who have reached Ferrytown, where a broad river can be crossed and the journey continued. But as the book opens, the river belches up a cloud of poisonous gas that has been long trapped beneath its surface, and, like the people of Pompeii, every resident and visitor in Ferrytown, every mule and dog, dies in minutes. The only ones to escape are Franklin, who has climbed a hill above the town to find shelter and tend to his wounded knee, and Margaret, expelled from the town because she is sick with a contagious flux and condemned to lie in a secluded hut -- the pesthouse -- till she dies. But contrary to expectations, she is not dying but recovering when Franklin seeks shelter in the hut. Together they set out to reach the coast and the ships.

This, then, is a book about what might be called the new end of the world. The former end of the world, the one whose classic accounts were Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker and Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz and that spawned a hundred others, was brought about by the bomb. The new end of the world has less clear causes: global warming, social exhaustion, the apparent failure of the built world -- the multiple disasters underlying Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Nowhere in The Pesthouse is any explanation offered for why the world is as it is, or how long it has been so. It's been long enough for a primitive kind of sociability to have evolved, with rules of behavior: The stranger is to be welcomed; young men are to greet older persons first; "a man's beard should be longer than a man's neck"; "never bare your throat to strangers." But rustlers and "landlopers" raid the weak and enslave the unprotected, and misery is general.

Franklin and Margaret pass through dangers and hungers. They are separated for a time. Franklin is enslaved by a beribboned brigand and his gang. Margaret is threatened with rape and ends up with the grandchild of two refugees who have abandoned her. Throughout, a delicate, touching, shy romance blossoms with great slowness between Franklin and Margaret. Modesty and pudeur are strong in this world, and these two people won't pass bounds. They are pals, says Crace. But they are also a family, with a child. And when the coast and the ships they have longed for and dreamed of turn out to be not what they imagined, they are faced with a choice that mingles disillusion and new hope in equal measure.

Most tales of the end of the world have a lesson or a warning to offer. The former end of the world warned against nuclear weapons; newer tales have other lessons. The Pesthouse seems at first to have none, but there are depths below the plain prose (plain but strange, as if handmade long after the prose factory has closed). Shift your glance only a little and you can see families and strangers such as might be walking away from any disaster anywhere in the present, amid ruins, toward some hopeless hope, without sustenance, without protection, their old human kindnesses and honor strained or broken but not forgotten, as though Crace wants us to see fates that are common elsewhere suffered here, in an America that's to be escaped from and not to.

At one moment, I'm certain our world shows through: Margaret, separated from Franklin, finds shelter with a cult that blames the woes of the world on metal, which they won't even touch. They will take in only those who give up all the metal they have. "Margaret watched as the . . . families ahead of her in line were frisked by devotees in gloves and then required to empty out their bags, every single item, and put their shoes and belts onto the tables."

Crace's America lies not in the future but in our uneasy consciences. What's remarkable is the fortitude, grace and patience he grants to the wary people who must make a life there, must remember and love, against all odds.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (May 6, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307278956
• ISBN-13: 978-0307278951
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #306,447 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

64 of 67 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "This used to be America. It used to be the safest place on earth.", May 6, 2007

By	Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Pesthouse (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.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An easy book to set aside, May 17, 2007

By	Patrick (Oak Park, IL United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Pesthouse (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.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Flawless!, August 21, 2007

By	Cipriano "www.bookpuddle.blogspot.com" (Planet Claire) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Pesthouse (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.