![]() ![]() (In Cracean time a millennium here or there is not significant.) America, for reasons that appear to include major seismic shifts leading to the plague, has collapsed into a chaotic dark age, in which robber bands, bizarre millenarian religious sects, nomads, hunters and foragers of all sorts are found. In his latest novel, The Pesthouse, Crace has imagined a dystopian America, perhaps 500, perhaps 1,000 years hence. Characters are often seen in a landscape, and they are not necessarily privileged by being human. ![]() Instead his settings range from the Stone Age to the English coast and the Judaean desert around Qumran. ![]() Crace is not a writer of the moment he is not a realist writer nor a writer looking for the witty aperçu about contemporary society, although his books contain allegorical references to the present. The people in his books are often the subjects of these forces, their lives and struggles the background to an unending and strangely lyrical but implacable play of forces beyond their control. He is the poet of detail, the laureate of the mineral, the bacterial and the gaseous. ![]()
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