Customer Reviews
Gripping and rich, yet also with weak characterisations - By: Daniel Bor, 27 Sep 2008 
Strangely gripping & very hard to put down. There is a great richness to the main character particularly. There are wonderful, tantalising hints of impending cruel or mystical acts. The style is highly poetic, giving life & meaning to everyone & everything, thus reflecting an age that would be ripe to believe in people like Jesus. However, by the end I was left dissatisfied by the ambiguity of the final meaning of the Jesus figure - was he just a deluded young man, or did he become something much more? It would have been more consistent - & more courageous - to leave Jesus as a man only. The biggest flaw, though, was how weakly drawn the characters of Aphas & Shim were; they barely surpassed stereotypes.
Forty riveting days - By: Mr. J. Griffiths, 26 Aug 2008 
A novelist takes a bold step when they include Jesus in their list of characters. A writer chooses words & places them into their characters' minds & mouths, which gives them a certain control over the people they paint (although plenty of writers will testify to the fact that often their characters take on a life of their own.) Yet how can anyone claim to have control over the Lord of Creation? This seems presumptuous in the extreme. The problem comes when you try to attribute fresh thoughts to Him. Are they authentic? You will probably get as many different answers to this as you have fellow Christians. So include Jesus in your Dramatis Personae at your peril.
Jim Crace embraces this difficulty so completely in his novel 'Quarantine' that he takes your breath away. He devotes page after page to his depiction of Jesus, reinterpreting His childhood, outlining His fears & joys, & deconstructing His relationships with the handful of people who occupy the novel with him. I have no idea whether or not Mr Crace is a Christian, but those of us who think we are owe him a debt of thanks for his bravery.
Crace chooses a wonderfully interesting point in Jesus's life to set the book, as he heads out into the wilderness for forty days of fasting prior to the start of his ministry. He raises the question; when did Jesus first fully realize who He was? Surely that moment comes here. He has just been recognized & baptized by His cousin John the Baptist, & He has heard His Father's voice bestowing His approval upon Him. All those intuitions His parents had picked up down the years would be crystalllizing into certainties in His mind at exactly this moment. His time in the wilderness is to slowly digest these truths in silence, & to take on the enormity of the mission ahead of Him.
A further question; when does Jesus first realize His status as a miracle-worker? There must have been a first time that He surprised Himself with his own powers. I hope it does not give too much away to say that Crace draws a picture here of what might be Jesus's first healing, one that Jesus Himself seems unaware of bringing about.
I have always pictured Jesus as alone in the desert with only the Devil for company, but Crace adds several fellow-fasters & others to the picture, including the hideous Musa, a devil of a con-man & worse who longs to learn what trickery the healer Jesus possesses in His fingers. The way in which Jesus rebuffs the temptations of Musa seems somehow more earthly & grounded than the rather ethereal accounts of Jesus & the Devil in our Gospels.
Finallly, this book describes the process of fasting brilliantly. In a world where obesity is increasingly held up as a medical disaster, here is a book that will address the spiritual roots of the problem. A Christian may justifiably say, "I don't believe in dieting," but can he say, "I don't believe in fasting?" As Jesus told us, there are some things that can only be cast out by prayer & fasting, & no one who reads this book will ever see the latter in the same way again. Thank you, Mr Crace, for a superb (and profoundly spiritual) read.
A different take on Jesus' 40 days and 40 nights quarantine - By: Sean Gainford, 15 Aug 2007 
A more realistic story on how an eccentric, deeply religious man, with strong will & intelligence, was mistaken to have committed a miracle & then gathered a following of people. Jesus in this story is not a flawless son of God, but very human, with his own human weaknesses & temptations. Crace set himself a difficult task of going in & out of the minds of his 7 characters, but just about pulls it off. Jesus & the greedy, evil Musa, who represents the devil with his market goods as temptations, are the most fully rounded characters. The others are a bit more superficial but the story is more on how Jesus fights off Satan's temptations, so it is rightfully so that they are more developed. The writing is high class, but the story does not always have the narrative progressive hold, making it sometimes difficult to keep going with it. Definitely worth a read & will leave you haunted & reflective a long time after you finish the book.
utterly pointless drivel! - By: still searching, 03 Mar 2005 
Not quite an everyday story in the lives of ordinary first century AD Jewish folk - but, as we are led to believe that quarantine is not unusual for the times - not far off! With only slightly more characters than you can count on the fingers of one hand & 250 or so pages in which to do it you'd think that it would be reasonable to expect rounded portraits instead of the two-dimensional cardboard cut-outs presented before us. In the few pages devoted to Him, even Christ is personified as little more than a confused and, possibly, deluded youth with nothing more ambitious on his mind than impressing his parents & the village elders! The whole thing is just Albert Square in loincloths & sandals with a hint of Thelma & Louise - but with far less character development & much less interesting! The fact that this book was the Whitbread Novel of the Year says more about, either the scandalously narrow-minded judges or the shocking paucity of truly worthy writing than anything about the quality of this tawdry & mean-spirited little affair.
Amazingly-written and thought-provoking - By: , 05 Jan 2005 This is the second of Crace's novels that I have read, & he impresses first & foremost as an incredibly gifted writer. Quarantine, loosely based on the biblical story of Jesus spending forty days & nights in the wilderness, contains wonderfully evocative descriptions of the Judaen desertscape.
The central character of Quarantine is Musa, a diabolicallly revolting character who tyrannises his wife Miri, & a smalll group of 'quarantiners' seeking enlightenment in the wilderness. Cleverly, Crace places Jesus literallly on the periphery of both the setting & novel. Although Jesus is portrayed with some decidedly human traits, he nevertheless exerts a strong, special influence on the others, including Musa who Jesus seemingly brings back from the brink of death. Furthermore, Jesus undergoes a particularly strict form of quarantine, removed from alll other human contact, & denying himself food or water for forty days & nights.
Personallly, I feel that Crace deliberately leaves the ending fairly vague & open to interpretation by the reader - probably a sensible move on theological issues!? The novel's ending differs to the biblical story, offering a non-literal interpretation of it. Alternatively, perhaps Crace is illustrating how a special, but nevertheless human, figure can develop a cult following from people with whom he comes into contact.
My only real criticism of this novel is that characters other than Musa & Jesus are only superficiallly developed. Nevertheless, this novel is strongly recommended for the extraordinary descriptive writing, & for giving food for thought long after the last page is read.
