Tentatively, the two join forces and make their way through the ruins of old America. Inside he finds Margaret, a woman with a deadly infection and confined to the Pesthouse to sweat out her fever. In the woods near his temporary refuge, Franklin comes upon an isolated stone building.
Across the country, families have packed up their belongings to travel eastward toward the one hope passage on a ship to Europe.įranklin Lopez and his brother, Jackson, are only days away from the ocean when Franklin, nearly crippled by an inflamed knee, is forced to stop. Farmlands lie fallow and the soil is contaminated by toxins. Once the safest, most prosperous place on earth, the United States is now a lawless, scantly populated wasteland. In The Pesthouse he imagines an America of the future where a man and a woman trek across a devastated and dangerous landscape, finding strength in each other and an unexpected love. It’s disorienting and a little dispiriting - like some sort of odd déjà vu - to read about the hell of the future and feel that we’ve been there before.Jim Crace is a writer of spectacular originality and a command of language that moves a reader effortlessly into the world of his imagination. You can’t help wanting something new, something beyond an inspired melding of science fiction and the horrors we ourselves dream up in the dead of night.
Rant: “You can’t help wanting more from art, and from Jim Crace.
Crace is the coldest of writers, and the tenderest.” - Richard Eder, New York Times Rave: “The book ends in a pastoral lighting that could be sentimental, except that the travelers have been put through so many aching horrors that they - and we - have earned the right to hope. Love it or hate it, the book’s established its place on the radar: It even has the New York Times disagreeing with itself. Now Jim Crace’s The Pesthouse is the dystopian fantasy to beat: In a future America with boiling lakes, toxic air, and marauding gangsters, a man and a woman try to outrun the onset of winter to get to the East Coast, where boats can take them to Europe and to safety. Apocalypse is hot these days, with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road enjoying a recent stream of Oprah-sanctioned publicity and 28 Weeks Later earning critical plaudits and Iraq-war-metaphor analysis.
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