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Quarantine (1997)

Whitbread Prize Winners (1997)

    And immediately the spirit driveth him into the wilderness. And he was there in the wilderness forty
    days, tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him.
        -Gospel According to Mark 1: 12-13

This novel is the latest installment in a sub-genre of literature where the central conceit is to tell a story from the point of view of the minor characters in a famous tale, with the more renowned stars of the originals taking in subordinate roles. Previous examples have included, Wide Sargasso Sea (derived from Jane Eyre), Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Hamlet), Man Friday (Robinson Crusoe), Jack Maggs (Great Expectations), and so forth. But Jim Crace has set his sights even higher than those classics; in Quarantine he tells the story of Christ's forty days in the wilderness, but with Jesus shunted to the periphery, in favor of several other pilgrims. In particular, the novel focuses on a trader, Musa--dishonest, loutish, and brutal--whom Jesus almost incidentally brings back to life from an apparently fatal illness. In turn it is only Musa, despicable as he is, who realizes that there is something extraordinary about this young man from Galillee.

The novel is only partially successful, in large measure because this structural technique falls flat. While Crace succeeds brilliantly in evoking the harsh atmosphere in which the quarantine takes place, the narrative comes to a screeching halt whenever Jesus is absent. Musa is simply too unpleasant a character for us to care what happens to him and none of the others really grab our attention. Nor can their stories hope to compete with the action we know to be taking place away from center stage.

Crace's demystification of Jesus is not very effective either. On the one hand he portrays Jesus as merely an overly pious youth, estranged from his family because of his bizarre behavior, and says of those who undertake this desert ordeal :

    This was the season of the lunatics: the first new moon of spring was summoning those men--for
    lunatics are mostly men. They have the time and opportunity--to exorcize that part of them which
    sent them mad. Mad with grief, that is. Or shame. Or love. Or illness and visions. Mad enough to
    think that everything they did, no matter how vain or trivial, was of interest to their god. Mad
    enough to think that forty days of discomfort could put their world in order.

The fact that Musa turns out to be such an unsuitable candidate for resurrection, defrauding his fellow travelers and finally even raping one young woman, is probably intended to be an ironic comment on the nature of "miracles." And the torments sent by Satan to test Jesus are revealed to be nothing but petty annoyances foisted upon him by Musa.

But even with all that, the demands of Crace's own plot and very the things that drew him to this story in the first place work against this kind of debunking. The epigraph to the novel notes that a man could not live past thirty days without food and water, and yet Jesus does. The world might have been a better place without Musa, and yet Jesus did revive him. And Jesus may have been a lunatic, but his "discomforts" did indeed bring a new order to the world. There's a reason we only recall one of the folks who was in the desert for those forty days; Messiah or not, he's the one who mattered.

This then is a novel that is certainly interesting, and sometimes quite powerful and even transporting, but in trying to play up the experience while diminishing the experiencer it gets at cross purposes with itself. For me at least, it just didn't quite work.

(Reviewed:22-Apr-01)

Grade: (C)

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Quarantine (1997)

Whitbread Prize Winners (1997)

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