Only the crazy make it

Thomas Jones

• BuyThe Pesthouse by Jim Crace
  Picador, 309 pp, £16.99, March 2007, ISBN 978 0 330 44562 7

In Jim Crace’s most celebrated novel, Quarantine, seven strangers spend a month together – or if not exactly together, then in close proximity to one another – in the Judaean desert. Four of them have come to spend forty days in fasting and contemplation in the hope of a miracle: an old stonemason from Jerusalem, dying of cancer; a woman who thinks she is unable to conceive, just like her husband’s previous wife; a young man looking for something he can’t quite name, something more than a meeting with God, something beyond enlightenment; a ‘badu’, a wild man from the deserts to the south, who the others think is mad but turns out instead to be deaf. Two of the seven are there not by choice: a merchant who was abandoned by the rest of his caravan after falling ill, and his pregnant wife. The last of them is ‘a traveller called Jesus, from the cooler, farming valleys in the north, a Galilean’.