The Pesthouse

In this postapocalyptic novel by Whitbread winner Jim Crace (QUARANTINE), a catastrophic epidemic has left the United States a desolate wasteland. Margaret and Franklin are trekking east to the ocean, where they hope to board a ship to escape to a better life in Europe. "On the road," so to speak, they are awed by the relics of civilization they pass by as Crace makes clear the relationship between the future he imagines and our current worship of progress--no matter what the cost. Michael Kramer gives a steady narration that results in a smooth portrayal of the reserved main characters. As they confront the hardships of Crace's imagined world, Kramer presents a range of restrained emotions that are fitting to their personalities. J.E.M. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

January 29, 2007
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.