Jim Crace’s new novel has an intriguing premise: in a ruined future, America is limping back towards its eastern shores and to the ships that will return its people to the old world. Unfortunately, Crace passes up the opportunity for a grand meditation on the collapse of a nation and an ideology, preferring instead to tell a familiar story of travel through a lawless post-apocalyptic world.
In this world, people collect in strange, ragged little bands, clinging together for warmth, safety and the semblance of company. Protagonists Margaret and Franklin form just such an odd alliance. Ailing and outcast when they meet in an isolated shack called the ‘pesthouse’, they try to make it to the east coast.
We are told that something has happened to America, compelling its inhabitants to retrace the great migrations back east. But what the catastrophe might be that has rid America of technology, medicine and social order is never revealed. And this new reality is so dislocated from the old that it’s hard to see that there is anything specifically American about it. Occasional nods towards the rubble of cities and highways, individualistic behaviour and frontier-like gangs are not enough to engage this story with America’s history. Margaret’s and Franklin’s journey, with its requisite bandits, rapists and strange sects, could be imagined anywhere. And this is seriously disappointing.
At its best, ‘The Pesthouse’ exudes a kind of eerie charm. However, without making any serious comment on contemporary America, the story remains ethereal and, in the end, insignificant.
