Quarantine by Jim Crace
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I read Jim Crace’s Harvest and said of it: “I’m looking forward to going back and reading his other award-winning writing.” And now I have done so, although I am embarrassed to say this is the third book I’ve read by him, not the second. When I went to look up his other novels, I realized I had already read Being Dead. I say I’m “embarrassed” because, apparently, I’m not very good at remembering authors.
But I’ll say this, that reading someone you “know” is different from reading someone you don’t. I read Harvest with no expectations. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for Quarantine. I admit, I went in, expecting to be as moved, and I was not. Which may have been the fault of having expectations.
And here is a story with Jesus in it—virtually no one would be able to read a novel with Jesus in it and not have a picture in their head already. This, too, could lead to disappointment. Crace’s Jesus is not holy enough. Or he is too holy. Or too human. Not human enough. Too historically authentic. Lacking in reverence. Too reverential. Take your pick. It is a testimony to Crace’s creativity that this Jesus will be nothing like anyone’s expectations.
This is a novel that uses all the language and imagery and sensibility of religion, but is not in the least religious. Here is hard-scrabble account, the harsh reality of spending 40 days in the desert, that somehow evokes a calmness and a peace.
But for all that, Jesus is not the main character in this novel. The main character is the devil that tempts him, but not a biblical devil. An evil, but the kind that’s as familiar as any jerk that cuts you off in traffic. As ubiquitous as the lies that eat away your soul—the ones that you are told, and the ones you accept.
It would be too easy to liken one’s dropping oneself into a book to a quarantine, a fast, a spiritual journey begging questions of a god, the author. That’s maybe glib, and certainly not the point of this novel. But whenever I go into these books, either wide-eyed or jaded, I always come out of them either plump or emaciated, dirtier or cleaner—but never the same as when I started. That’s all one can really ask of a good read. I expected something else, was not satisfied in that expectation, and yet I’m not left wanting.