I first heard about this book from the horse’s mouth so to speak. We were listening to The Diane Rehm show on NPR (National Public Radio). Diane sounds as if she has a voice disorder and speaks really slowly and gruffly but she does great rambling interviews and this day she was interviewing Jim Crace about his latest novel The Pesthouse. You can hear the interview here (and the Alan Alda one is good too).
The premise of this simple tale is that of two people who meet, go on a journey together and fall in love. The setting is an America set in the future – after some kind of global plague has gone through and the cities more or less abandoned. (Yes. Another dystopic novel)
Jim is an Englishman and so might be better able to imagine a “broken” America of the future. An America whose inhabitants want to leave. Everyone is travelling east to catch a boat to Europe perceived as the promised land.
Does Jim hate America? He wasn’t sure. He said (from memory) in the interview that he had a love/hate relationship with the states and wasn’t sure how he felt when he started the book. America has become the country we love to hate. Being the most powerful country will do that. Read the book and you’ll know how he felt at the end.
His heroine has red hair, shaven off. Why? He just loves strong women with red hair.
And what did I think?
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Perhaps it was because I’m into this dystopia phase at the moment.
I think though it is because of the writing. It is sublime. Poetic. Take this description of the tall ships seen for the first time by our heroes through ancient binoculars:
It was not through the pipes, though that Franklin caught sight of his first oceangoing ship, full-rigged and shirty in the wind. p201
If I’d written that line – full-rigged and shirty – I’d have stopped, fully satisfied with my days work. That is a satisfying line of prose.
The Pesthouse is my new favourite novel. I am re-reading it.