The Pesthouse

Typical: you wait ages for a decent post-apocalyptic novel, then two come along within the space of four months

And from the same publisher. But the books in question – Jim Crace’s The Pesthouse and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road – are very different beasts indeed. McCarthy’s vision is of a bleak and blasted world, where humans revert to the basest behaviour in order to survive. He writes in short, sparse sentences, filmic flashes that build up a picture of an ashen, destroyed landscape and a society that has almost completely broken down. Death is everywhere.

Jim Crace, however, has written a page-turning novel full of detail, description and – surprisingly – love. His America has reverted to an almost medieval way of life, in which horse-drawn carts are the most advanced mode of transport and itinerant traders swap goods for food. Technology in general – and metal in particular – is viewed with suspicion (and, in some cases, shunned entirely: ‘What had the Baptists said? “Metal has brought Death into the world. Rust and Metal are God’s reply”’).

Like McCarthy, Crace is not explicit about the nature of the disaster, but he does make it clear that it happened long enough ago for people to have forgotten about writing and the names of such everyday objects as binoculars.

The pesthouse of the title is a resting (or dying) place for victims of the ‘flux’; a small hut away from the town where the afflicted, or potentially afflicted, are taken by their families, either to recover or to die. Before a victim enters the hut, all their hair is removed.

When Margaret, shorn of her distinctive, flame-coloured locks, is deposited in the hut, up in the hills above her home in Ferrytown, she has no idea that her incarceration will save her life. Likewise, the well-meaning young man Franklin, whose aching knee prevents him from descending into the town with his brother. A night of foul weather draws him to the warmth of the pesthouse, in spite of the risk of infection.

With all that they have held dear gone forever, Margaret and Franklin team up and join the exodus of people travelling east to take passage across the ocean to a better life. Given the history of America’s colonisation in the eighteenth century this is obviously ironic, and it is no surprise that the pair soon face the kind of troubles that the first settlers suffered heading in the other direction.

The Pesthouse is a surprisingly conventional novel for Crace, albeit one with an unconventional setting. His love of words and the careful way he crafts his sentences remain, but the straightforward narrative drives the story along, and the tender bond between Margaret and Franklin is touchingly conveyed.

Like Beyond the Burning Lands, John Christopher’s wonderful (and disappointingly out of print) trilogy for younger readers, The Pesthouse, while positing a future in which humankind’s obsession with technology has been its downfall, is also a great – and surprisingly affirmative – adventure in its own right.