The Galilean

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In the following review, Korn offers a positive assessment of Quarantine.
SOURCE: Korn, Eric. “The Galilean.” Times Literary Supplement (13 June 1997): 25.

Roughing it in Ruristan is a fine thing, but one of the keenest pleasures of dependent travel is the trusting sense of infantile repose that comes from a guide (or guidebook), whose first words give assurance that you are going to be shown the most important and impressive sites in suitable logical order, and with adequate commentary; that you will not be mislaid, delayed, deluded, hijacked, persecuted by thirst or heat or postcard-sellers; and that there will be cold drinks and comfort at the end.

All readers of fiction are dependent travellers, and Jim Crace's masterful narratology sets one musing on the nature of the authoritative. When he speaks, you listen, where he leads, you try to follow. This has nothing to do with the mandarin, the high-falutin, the condescending, the knowing, the self-righteous, the boastful, the pompous, the preachy, the sententious, the hieratic, the vatic, or the aristocratic. (And Quarantine is evidence that it is not simply a matter of wanting to know what happens next. Since the subject is Jesus in the desert, most readers could hazard a guess at how it is going to come out. They would, possibly, be wrong.)

Consider, or simply rejoice in, his opening. The uncompromising brilliance of phrasing involves the reader straightaway. Miri is woken by Musa's groaning:

his tongue was black: scorched and sooty. Miri smelled the devil's eggy dinner roasting on his breath; she heard the snapping of the devil's kindling in his cough. She put her hand on to his chest; it was soft, damp, and hot, like fresh bread. Her husband, Musa, was being baked alive. Good news.

(But Musa will not die, not yet, and by one reading, not ever.)

Five people come to the desert of Judaea, for a quarantine, a fast of forty days. For four of them, the standard daytime fast will be enough. Crace crisply enumerates their reasons: “madness, madness, cancer, sterility.” They are Shim, part-Jew, part-Greek, sophisticate, religious dilettante, sceptic; Aphas, an old man with a new growth, looking for a simple miracle; Marti, the childless wife of a barren marriage, about to be cast off by her philoprogenitive husband; a nameless, perhaps Tourettic nomad, whose hopes remain unintelligible. And Jesus, a callow young man from Galilee with Messianic ambitions. He intends a total fast. Crace's epigraph, from a physiological treatise, The Limits of Mortality, is inexorable: “the forty 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.” If this be so, what is left to tell? Plenty, as it happens. Crace loves what he calls “the truth, bleak and comforting.” But the hard-edged and unredeemable is shadowed by the uncertain, the ambiguous, and the unexpectedly consolatory.

There are already two people by the caves and the cliff, when the pilgrims arrive. The merchant, Musa, a man of unlimited and merciless violence, greed and craftiness, the almost irredeemable genius of commerce, is sick and has been left to die by the caravan of his no more tender-hearted comrades. Miri, the abused, pregnant, long-suffering wife, has no reason to be thankful for his unexpected recovery, after Jesus blunders into his tent to beg or steal some water (before the commencement of the forty days), presses the sick man's chest, moistens his lips, gives him a casual blessing: “‘So here, be well again,’ he said, a common greeting for the sick.” The merchant recovers but is not reformed by the apparent miracle. The pilgrims are his prey; he bullies and harasses them, charges for the use of his caves, for the water in his waterhole, for the wild honey that the nomad collects. He fantasizes and plots violent lecheries against Marti. But he is the one most exercised, obsessed by Jesus, trapped by Grace, if your theology will stomach that. The dim possibility of redemption for this man is one incontrovertible miracle, and the one place where my belief was strained. Crace hates what Pound calls usura and other monetarism, the dead hand of profit. The agent Howells in Crace's previous novel Signals of Distress, the crafty craftless dealer in a town of sailors, whose sleazy tar-saving sinks ships, is a philanthropist compared to Musa.

There are seven living human characters, and as many devils and gods and angels as you should wish for. And the desert is a character, the bitter scrub, the stony ground, harsh but not merciless. Crace designs a dozen absorbing small dramas to entertain us, while the theological struggle rumbles on. Miri sets up a loom to weave a birth mat. The tribesman traps a bird. Physical sufferings, the aches of muscles and bowels and bladders are described with vivacity and zest. Trying to pray, Jesus “woke with a falling shudder after just a moment's sleep”: the most vivid and concise description of fatigue narcolepsy that I have encountered. Few since St Teresa have had such a vivid and intimate perception of the corporeal Christ.

An actor once spoke of the three unactable parts: Shakespeare, Christ and Jeeves. Two of the three are likewise awkward characters in realist novels. But Crace escapes all pitfalls. He can write about whatever he wants, as long as every page crackles with new-baked images, with felicities of perception and phrases. He loves hard and evocative words, not the elegant or scholarly or jargonical, but the language of trades and crafts, words obscure (and possibly invented): heddles and shed sticks, (familiar to weavers), fret (= devour), bem, tarbony, aggry (“a word of unknown origin and meaning,” says OED). These tricks of diction always please. Entranced by such diversions, we are led cunningly through the most rugged terrain to astonishing vistas and huge speculations.

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