[In the following review, the critic offers a positive assessment of Quarantine.]

This novel about Jesus' 40 days in the wilderness—and the six people who spend more than a month in close proximity to him—is both fascinating and puzzling. [Quarantine] is fascinating because Crace is a wonderful writer whose characters and setting draw one in and remain in one's mind. It is puzzling because his portrait of Jesus and of people's response to Jesus is so ambivalent—a portrait drawn by an agnostic who poses profound questions and gives no answers. Like four other people—two mad, one sick, one infertile—Jesus comes to the wilderness for quarantine—40 days of living in a cave in the scrublands, fasting, praying and meditating by day in order to be purified, blessed, cured. Driven into quarantine by pride or desperation, the others make themselves as comfortable as possible in their caves and break their fasts at sunset. But Jesus, a God-haunted teenager, will not compromise. He is determined to go for 40 days without food or water; he chooses an almost inaccessible cave; he throws his clothes over the precipice. Few people can live for more than 30 days—or be conscious for more than 25—without food and water, according to a source cited at the opening of the book. No one can survive 40 days of complete fasting. Crace's Jesus does indeed die, but he is resurrected. A merchant, Musa, and his abused wife, Miri, are stranded in the desert near those in quarantine. Musa is the first person Jesus heals (inadvertently), but Musa is also the tempter who tries to lure him from his mission—and the first witness to Jesus' first resurrection. The devil in this novel is such a complex, intriguing character that he nearly steals the show.