Talese / Doubleday $24.95), is set in an indeterminate American future, scarcely distinguishable from a frontier past. Contemporary “speculative fiction” shares that aim it extrapolates from current conditions and urges us to confront the consequences.Ĭrace’s effort, aptly titled “The Pesthouse” (Nan A. These novels are fundamentally didactic their authors have crucial lessons to impart. Certainly, most fiction about the future-not least the famous dystopian works by Wells, Huxley, and Orwell-is designed to unsettle and provoke. Kingsley Amis once remarked that there isn’t much point to writing if you can’t annoy someone it might be said that there isn’t much point to writing about the future unless you can frighten someone. Now comes a grim prophetic fable by the much admired British writer Jim Crace, who in previous novels-“The Gift of Stones,” set at the dawn of the Bronze Age “Quarantine,” in the time of Christ-has shown a flair for imaginatively evoking the past. James (“The Children of Men”), John Updike (“Toward the End of Time”), Margaret Atwood (“The Handmaid’s Tale,” “Oryx and Crake”), Doris Lessing (“Mara and Dann”), and Cormac McCarthy (“The Road”). It is less than Crace has proved himself capable of.Long the province of genre entertainments-science fiction, dystopian fantasy, post-apocalyptic movies-the future has been boldly explored in recent years by such writers as P. His prose is simple but lyrical, with flashes of tenderness and incandescence. Romance and adventure entwine, as the two cling together for 250 pages until a happy ending implausibly kicks in.Īs a writer Crace deserves attention. As our hero Franklin journeys forth, he encounters Margaret, amongst the cadavers, quarantined in the pesthouse, her head shaved and eyelashes plucked out to combat the plague.

Lest the moral of the story get you down (or alienate the lucrative American market) there's a love story to divert the attention. But unless the country changes its ways, Crace is saying, the United States will get a taste of the dark ages.

If details of what brought a superpower to its knees sound sketchy, the ideology that hums beneath the surface of the novel is all too clear America is committing suicide, it just doesn't know it yet. The great exploration that gave birth to America, settlers and explorers coming from across the sea and travelling inland from east to west, is reversed: the displaced seek escape, their hopes pinned on rumours of ships setting sail to a safer place. The America envisioned by Crace has been ravaged by a plague, with society and history the first casualties.

Anyone who was sucked into Cormac McCarthy's dank, dystopian trip through post-apocalyptic America in The Road will recognise the territory covered in The Pesthouse. This book has been written before and written better.

The pesthouse