The Pesthouse

by: Jim Crace

Published by: Nan A. Talese

Reviewed by Kathy Perschmann

Crace’s ninth book, this one is as unusual and distinctive as his earlier works.

Pesthouse is set in a future America, a place much like the Wild West, with no government, history, or industry. Travel is by horseback or cart. Unspecified plagues and toxic disasters have created a landscape of “junkles,” large cities of rubble, and small towns and groups of farmsteads where the inhabitants fend off attacks from lawless robbers and slavers.

Large areas are barren and unsuitable for habitation. Life has gotten so dangerous that many are leaving for the East Coast, to try to find passage aboard a ship east—to a dream world without lawlessness and disease, a land of fabled safety and abundance.

Franklin and his older brother Jackson are traveling east and arrive at Ferrytown, where they plan to cross a large river when Franklin’s knee finally gives out, and he begs his brother for a chance to rest. Jackson goes into Ferrytown where he dies during the night, along with all of the town’s inhabitants, due to a release of poisonous gas from the nearby lake bottom as the result of a landslide.

Margaret has been taken up the hill from the town to the remote pesthouse, where she was left to die (or possibly survive) the “flux,” after having all her body hair removed. There she meets Franklin, who helps her down to the town a few days later where they find a town full of corpses. They flee by a secret bridge over the river, and make their way east, meeting up with other travelers. They are separated when Franklin is captured by slavers. Margaret accompanies the Boses, a rather self-centered couple traveling with their granddaughter, further east in the rather hopeless task of finding him and the Boses’ son.

This modern fairy tale includes an odd religious sect where Margaret and the child find winter shelter, the Fingerless Baptists, who abhor all metal, and make everyone abandon all things made of metal, whether it be belt buckles, pots, knives, or jewelry—because it is the cause of war and greed. This metal attracts the slavers, and there is a possibility of Franklin and Margaret reuniting. Margaret hears that the sailing ships from the east will only take attractive single women of child-bearing age, and young men with skills; and only very, very wealthy families.

Crace’s writing is unusual; the dialogue is odd, very post apocalyptic. The landscape is described intensely, and the odd communities and the casual hostility towards strangers are unnerving. Margaret and Franklin, for all their strangeness, are people we care about.

Armchair Interviews says: This would make a very intriguing book club selection.

Author’s Web site: http://www.Jim-Crace.com