SOURCE: Allen, Brooke. “Jesus Lives.” New Leader (1–15 June 1998): 15–16.

One hundred and thirty years after T. H. Huxley coined the term “agnosticism” in an attempt to reconcile religious feeling with Charles Darwin's new theories, the dispute between science and religion is very much alive. In American schools—70 years after the Scopes trial in Tennessee—Christian groups still challenge the teaching of evolution. On the opposing side, hard-core scientific rationalists argue that geological evidence of the earth's age proves the Bible is fiction, and that religious faith is more akin to superstition than to any spiritual truth.

Yet throughout such controversies the power of the Christian narrative and its symbolism have proved resistant to the scientific revolution. The well-educated upper and middle classes in Europe and North America tend to be skeptical, but a significant and vocal portion of the population adamantly adheres to one or another Christian sect. In Europe violent conflict continues to take place along ancient religious fault lines, pitting Christians against Muslims—and each other. All this is true, too, outside what was once considered “Christendom.” In Africa, to cite one example, a new wave of martyrs is being created as many lose their lives rather than submit to forcible conversion to Islam.

This tenacious quality of the Christian religion is what makes Jim Crace's new novel, Quarantine, fail in its original purpose. It is also what makes the work succeed on another, and certainly more interesting, level.

“I'm not even a relaxed atheist, I'm a post-Dawkins scientific atheist,” said Crace in an interview with the Manchester Guardian shortly after Quarantine was published in England last year (he was referring to British scientist Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene). “On those rare occasions I do encounter the Christian religion I'm struck by how simpleminded it is.” Crace had intended to write a novel that would expose that simplemindedness; what he found himself writing, however, was something quite different.

The setting is the Judean desert, some 2,000 years ago. Musa, a Jewish merchant, is unconscious with fever and has been left by his trading caravan to die. His pregnant wife, Miri, has been left behind as well, to see him into the next world. The caravan leaders have promised to return for her in the spring, but Miri, a realist toughened by a lifetime of bad treatment, knows they will not bother. “The plain, commercial truth,” she thinks to herself, is that she is “not worth the trip.”

Looking at her dying husband, his mouth blackened and his breath sulfurous, Miri decides to walk away and return that afternoon to bury the corpse. As she wanders into the desert, she finds her spirits rising with hope for the future. When the sadistic Musa dies she will be free, and she feels equal to practically any hardship so long as he will not be there to beat and harangue her.

While she is gone a group of pilgrims pass by on their way to spend the traditional “quarantine,” a 40-day period of solitude, daylight fasting and prayer, in the nearby caves.

There were five of them—not in a group, but strung out along the road. … Three men, a woman and, too far behind for anyone to guess its gender, a fifth. And this fifth one was barefooted, and without a staff. No water-skin, or bag of clothes. No food. A slow, painstaking figure, made thin and watery by the rising, mirage heat.

We soon learn that he is a young Galilean named Jesus.

Footsore from his trip and nervous about his approaching fast, Jesus comes upon Musa's tent. Seeing that the dying man is not in a position to stop him, he helps himself to water and food and then, in a careless gesture of thanks, gives the automatic, traditional blessing: “So, here, be well again.” Musa, startlingly, recovers. Remembering the Galilean through his fever, he decides the young pilgrim has healed him. “It was a miracle,” he knew.

Revived, Musa sets out to harass the pilgrims. A ruthless man of business, he believes money can be made anywhere. Aside from their guide, a half-mad Bedouin, each of the travelers seems to be fairly easy prey. There is Marta, a barren wife desperately hoping for a child; Shim, a Hellenized Jew, vain and cynical; and Aphas, an old man seeking a cure for the cancer that is killing him. The three are lukewarm in their religious fervor; their quarantine is to be not a test for soul and spirit but a break from their normal lives, almost a holiday. They will fast during the day, eat and drink after the sun goes down.

“But Jesus had a harsher challenge for himself. Quite what it was he didn't know. He only understood that he should choose a way that was more punishing.” An ignorant adolescent motivated by a wish to prove both his superiority to the folks back home and his desire for revelation, Jesus decides that his fast will be total. For 40 days and nights neither food nor drink will pass his lips.

As envisioned by Crace, Jesus is not so much inspired as deluded; he is an innocent and foolish person with a naïve village outlook. “Here was a man who was in the mood to divine grand meanings in the simplest acts. There'd be no god without such men, prepared to make the little cause responsible for large effects, quick to find the lesson in the most everyday events.”

Crace implicitly contrasts Jesus with Miri, who “knew that life did not improve through prayer or miracles. The opposite, in fact.” The merciless, beautiful desert, a character in its own right with a will and a power of its own, seems to welcome and bless Miri while destroying the presumptuous Galilean. The novel's epigraph, from Ellis Winward and Michael Soule's The Limits of Mortality, gives a clue of what is to come:

An ordinary man of average weight and fitness embarking on a total fast—that is, a fast during which he refuses both his food and drink—could not expect to live for more than 30 days, nor to be conscious for more than 25. For him the 40 days of fasting described in religious texts would not be achievable—except with divine help, of course. History, however, does not record an intervention of that kind, and medicine opposes it.

As one might expect, Jesus suffers a precipitate decline and is dead before 30 days have passed. His suffering brings neither wisdom nor exaltation. He “had become a creature of the dark, a fugitive from pleasure, comfort, beauty, light,” and he had no one to blame for his miserable end. He was a victim of his own vanity.

Nevertheless, we create our gods out of our own needs, as Crace reminds us. Musa, out of both a real belief in Jesus' healing powers and greedy contemplation of the money to be made with a tame faith healer, persuades the others that the Galilean is the real thing. Each of them needs hope and belief, and each, for his own reasons, accepts Musa's assertion. Then, just as they are leaving their quarantine site, they actually see—or do they?—the risen Jesus, disappearing across the desert. As Crace himself put it in the same Guardian interview, his book “ends up with an ambiguity that would not embarrass many Christians.”

Almost against Crace's will, Quarantine is less a debunking of Jesus than a meditation on the human race's irrational, indestructible religious impulse. Jesus is presented as silly and ineffectual. Even if you believe, with Musa, that Jesus miraculously cured him, the cure was a bad deed, for Musa, an exploitative wife-beater and rapist, is evil. Despite having undercut Jesus, though, Crace emphasizes his strong effect on the others. He further complicates matters by describing in concrete terms the vision, real or imagined, of the Galilean risen from the dead:

Musa looked toward the distant scree again. He told himself this was no merchant fantasy. His Gally [Galilean] was no longer thin and watery, diluted by the mirage heat, distorted by the ripples in the air. He made his slow, painstaking way, naked and barefooted, down the scree, his feet blood-red from wounds, and as he came closer his outline hardened and his body put on flesh.

The New Testament story has inspired a lot of schlock and several fine novels. Among the schlock is Norman Mailer's execrable The Gospel According to the Son, published last year to shockingly respectful reviews. Far better are Michel Tournier's The Four Wise Men and Nikos Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ, made into an interesting if imperfect film by Martin Scorsese. There is also D. H. Lawrence's The Man Who Died, which might be put in either category, depending on your taste for Lawrence's wilder flights of fancy. Quarantine itself is of a very high quality indeed. Crace writes with a fluid, almost poetic grace, and displays a firm hold on language and imagery:

[Miri] had been told, when she was small, that the sky was a hard dish. She might bruise her fists on it if only she could fly. It was a gently rounded dish, blue when not obscured by clouds or night or shuddered into pinks and grays and whites by the caprices of the sun. But now she raised her hands into the unresisting air above the open grave and wondered if the dish were soft. And she could fly right through it, only slowly and coddled by its softness, like passing through the tough and cushioned alleys of the flesh, to take a place in heaven if she wanted, or to find that place on earth where she'd be undisturbed.

Over the years, more than one critic has likened Crace to William Golding. Like Golding, he tends to place his characters in narrow, closed communities where moral dramas are played out. Like Golding, too, he is brilliant at creating symbolic landscapes. Crace's desert, and his masterful evocation of a bygone culture that is ruthless, superstitious and aspiring, makes Quarantine a memorable piece of work.