The Pesthouse
Jim Crace Picador, 320pp, £16.99
ISBN 0330445626
Contemporary fiction is still recovering from Cormac McCarthy's The Road, a horrific vision of a father and son making their way across America's post-apocalyptic landscape. Now Jim Crace has joined him, with a vision of two people on the move in post-historical America, an America seen dozens of generations after some nameless, annihilating catastrophe.
The whole country has regressed to the 16th century, or further back than that. The crudest forms of farming and scavenging are now the only ways to exist. God and guns, the fundamental tenets of pioneer America, no longer exist. These folk, apparently monoglot Caucasians, make do with knives and wooden tools. Their conception of religion is limited to a cloudy sense of lighting a candle in one's heart in adversity and the singing of burial laments. The only religious community is a bizarre quasi-Amish settlement called the Finger Baptists, who believe that metal is the invention of the devil.
It is in this stunted future-past that Crace places his hero and heroine: a lanky, open-hearted young traveller called Franklin stumbles across Margaret, a beautiful, vulnerable village-dweller who, suffering from a plague known as the "flux", has been brutally quarantined in a secluded hillside hut called the Pesthouse, to live or die. An overnight mudslide into the village lake dislodges a huge, age-old sediment of poisonous gas that silently kills everyone, thus reproducing in microcosm the eco-disaster that (possibly) smashed American history in the first place.
Surviving outside the danger zone, Margaret and Franklin elect to join the nearest thing their deracinated society has to a gold rush: a frenzied urge to emigrate in the bizarrely anti-historical eastward direction, a dangerous journey past bandits and slave-masters to a seaboard where one's passage might be worked to a fabled land beyond the ocean, with "buildings made of decorated stone, and palaces and courts and gardens planted for their beauty, not for food".
The satire in all this is featureless but ferocious. Crace's new America, back to front in space and time, is completely and rigorously imagined, a world entire of itself. Neither utopia nor dystopia, it is denuded now of its capacity for wholesale destruction, and with scattered traditions of family love and neighbourliness, but still barbaric and fierce and strange, and it's a world from which history and culture have been amputated - by the author.
Crace has assumed the science-fiction writer's willingness to sketch out a vast new universe. In The Pesthouse, he triangulates a fictional voice with Pierre Boulle and Jonathan Swift, although resisting the urge to disinter a thrillingly recognisable fragment of modern society, like the wrecked Statue of Liberty poking up through the sand. Margaret owns an heirloom coin, and Crace shows us what people call the "junkle" of the ancient times - huge, cracked roads and vast baffling hunks of beached metal - but the purely ironic and comic effects of lost modernity are inappropriate for Crace's more austere project.
It is entirely compelling. The story is a gripping, harrowing adventure tale and Crace's language is extraordinary: he has immersed himself in his own kind of variant American idiom (complete, incidentally, with American spellings for this UK publication), which is simple, often beautiful, as tough and workable as leather.
How this quasi-American story by the Hertfordshire-born Crace will be received in the United States is an open question. Some may bristle at its presumption, and particularly at Crace's own statement that it originates from his "love/hate relationship with America" - a Euro-liberal wish-fulfilment fantasy of the bullyboy US bringing disaster on itself?
Crace's closure is a little neat, and even placid, considering the unidirectional rush of fear and exhilaration that has led towards it, but The Pesthouse resonates like an unresolved chord.
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