We can only read about death if we're not dead. And we can only read
about the end of civilization in the midst of civilization. Outside
our safe houses, the cars slide down the streets and trucks deliver
food to burgeoning grocery stores, while fire trucks and police cars
wait patent and ready, lest disaster strike. Inside the houses, we
are safe to keep watch on our world, to immerse ourselves in imaginative
visions in which the comforts and safety we enjoy have been swept
away. Only in prosperity can we enjoy tales of adversity.
It's with a peculiar frisson of pleasure that one reads 'The Pesthouse'
by Jim Crace. The world we now know has been summarily swept aside. There's
no specific indication as to what brought about the upending of the lives
we now lead. Some unspecified number of years in the future, America
has been reduced, if that's the right word, to a pre-18th century wilderness
devoid for the most part of working technology. Even the ruins are pretty
much gone. Those who wish to prosper, to find a life beyond the hardscrabble
of day-to-day existence, have no choice but to go east. There is hope
in the ships that slowly cross the Atlantic Ocean, taking passengers
to an almost legendary life in England or Europe. Civilization itself
has become a myth.
Franklin Lopez and his brother Jackson are on such a journey, the anti-myth-of-the-west,
when Franklin blows out his knee. Forced to remain behind on a mountainous
pass, he finds shelter in the Pesthouse with Margaret, a woman who may
or may not be infected with the Flux. Jackson journeys down the pass
to Ferrytown, where nature has plans of its own, beyond the control or
comprehension of those who inhabit this world. Margaret and Franklin,
brought together by weakness, must find the strength to continue eastward,
to civilization. For any one of us, it would be a day or so of driving,
riding the trains, a short plane hop. For Margaret and Franklin, it's
a mythic journey.
'The Pesthouse' is a novel drenched in melancholy and joy. Crace operates
on a variety of levels with equal ease, whether he's taking us through
the harsh beauty of nature re-asserting itself on a land once wrought
by the hand of man or on an inner journey through multiple inversions
of the myths we cherish, or the beliefs that create the world in which
we're reading the novel. Taken as a simple journey, 'The Pesthouse' is
powered by the poetry of Crace's language. It's a remarkably immersive
feat, the language in this novel. It’s not amenable to dissection
or analysis. Crace simply places us in a landscape with a minimum of
fuss. Yet there's an undeniable beauty to the sentences here, an effortless
evocation of the American landscape stripped of strip malls, a world
of nature once again run rampant like the paradise that must have greeted
the first American settlers who saw hope in the American west.
Crace has peopled his landscape with a variety of characters. Franklin
is a big young man. But he's not all that complicated. His life until
he shows up at the Pesthouse has mostly consisted of farm work at the
home he left behind to, go east, young man. In contrast, Margaret, raised
in the comparatively riotous atmosphere of Ferrytown, is a woman who
embodies the small conflicts of a wounded world. Crace's language is
both their saving grace. In lesser hands, both could be annoyingly dull
and superfluously meaningful. But Crace applies the same sober poetry
to his people as he does to the landscape they move through. He knows
how to plant sympathetic hooks in the reader, to let us like his people
rather than trying to make us like them. You might not notice even after
you've read the book.
Franklin and Margaret are not alone. Crace uses his skills as a writer
to apply just the right number of grace notes to a larger cast of secondary
characters to bring them to prickly, sometimes humorous life. From a
middle-class middle American couple – the Boses – to the
inhabitants of the "Finger Baptist" religious community, Crace
offers the kind of variety in his novel that is required to keep the
largely pastoral setting of interest to the modern reader. Particularly
noteworthy are the women of a coastal town, who have a fierce life that
claws its way forth from the pages to scratch through the complacency
one tends to find in post-apocalyptic fiction.
Though he's written a novel set in some future of uncertain provenance,
Crace, like many of today's best science fiction writers, is aware that
he's not making a prediction of the future so much as re-arranging the
present. The mythic and anti-mythic undercurrents of 'The Pesthouse'
have a real visionary power. Sometimes they manifest in a very funny
sense of humor, and others in a wistful upending of the world we live
in. It's a mixed bag, this future, set in despair, detoured through the
absurd, still open to the possibility of dreams. This is hope discovered
in the ruins. It's not a gift the world he has created gives Crace's
characters. It requires effort on the part of those in this world. This
is how the world ends – not with a bang, but a reset.