A review by shimmer
The Pesthouse by Jim Crace

3.0

Like many of Crace's novels, there's a strong sense of the environment (ie, geology, biology, etc.) existing independent of and indifferent to human lives lived within it. But unlike most of his books, the story of The Pesthouse never manages to rise above the fairly familiar post-apocalyptic fantasy/quest it starts with. There are provocative ideas about the literal undoing of manifest destiny and the backwards march of history, and I loved how inevitable yet satisfying the ending was, and how surprisingly that ending doesn't come off as pessimistic or depressing (I won't say how and spoil it). But whereas Crace's characters are always living what amount to small human lives in the face of a big, indifferent world, those lives usually have enough complexity to avoid seeming like ciphers or types, and I guess that just didn't happen for me with this novel (the way it did, for instance, with Signals Of Distress and it's complex reinvention of the tropes of a historical, maritime novel). So it ended up feeling like a fairly cliché story that only pointed toward what it might have been.