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A review by calwhimsey
Quarantine by Jim Crace
3.0
This book is brilliantly strange. Really stuck with me. Why only 3 stars then, you might ask. The story starts strong — intriguing, bold premise, treading softly even on the verge of controversy; gorgeous, lyrical language, at times slipping into a carefully measured iambic rhythm. And that’s the gist of the problem. The stellar qualities of Crace’s writing set the bar so high that the story itself, as it unfolds, sabotages what the novel sets out to do.
Does the retelling of Jesus’s 40 days in the desert outrage the Christian I am? Yes, it does. Is that why I ultimately felt disappointed? Absolutely not. Great literature always disturbs, offends and overwhelms. Thank goodness for that, for how else would we know what matters to us and why?
But great fiction is also, in my opinion, composed of the following: intriguing premise, beautiful language, and a good story. The last component is, regrettably, what Quarantine lacks. Most of the story describes the day-to-day reality of fasting (or not) in the Judean desert, Musa’s incessant mischief, and the radical starvation of the very human and unremarkable Jesus. In line with the uneventful quarantine, the ending is surprisingly anticlimactic.
Perhaps the uneventfulness is rightly descriptive of the scorching drudgery of fast and prayer in the desert when time is dragging more slowly than one would wish for. And perhaps the ending makes a statement. Be that as it may though, it’s not a statement I can understand or relate to.
Does the retelling of Jesus’s 40 days in the desert outrage the Christian I am? Yes, it does. Is that why I ultimately felt disappointed? Absolutely not. Great literature always disturbs, offends and overwhelms. Thank goodness for that, for how else would we know what matters to us and why?
But great fiction is also, in my opinion, composed of the following: intriguing premise, beautiful language, and a good story. The last component is, regrettably, what Quarantine lacks. Most of the story describes the day-to-day reality of fasting (or not) in the Judean desert, Musa’s incessant mischief, and the radical starvation of the very human and unremarkable Jesus. In line with the uneventful quarantine, the ending is surprisingly anticlimactic.
Perhaps the uneventfulness is rightly descriptive of the scorching drudgery of fast and prayer in the desert when time is dragging more slowly than one would wish for. And perhaps the ending makes a statement. Be that as it may though, it’s not a statement I can understand or relate to.