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    The Pesthouse
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    The Pesthouse
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    The Pesthouse
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Pesthouse

    Written by Jim Crace

    Narrated by Michael Kramer

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Once the safest, most prosperous place on earth, the United States is now a lawless, scantly populated wasteland. The machines have stopped. The government has collapsed. Farmlands lie fallow and the soil is contaminated by toxins. Across the country, families have packed up their belongings to travel eastward toward the one hope left: passage on a ship to Europe.

    Franklin Lopez and his brother, Jackson, are only days away from the ocean when Franklin, nearly crippled by an inflamed knee, is forced to stop. In the woods near his temporary refuge, Franklin comes upon an isolated stone building. Inside he finds Margaret, a woman with a deadly infection and confined to the Pesthouse to sweat out her fever. Tentatively, the two join forces and make their way through the ruins of old America. Confronted by bandits rounding up men for slavery, finding refuge in the Ark, a religious community that makes bizarre demands on those they shelter, Franklin and Margaret find their wariness of each other replaced by deep trust and an intimacy neither one has ever experienced before.

    THE PESTHOUSE is Jim Crace's most compelling novel to date. Rich in its understanding of America's history and ethos, it is a paean to the human spirit.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJun 5, 2007
    ISBN9781415940778
    Unavailable
    The Pesthouse
    Author

    Jim Crace

    Jim Crace is the prize-winning author of a dozen books, including Continent (winner of the 1986 Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize), Quarantine (1998 Whitbread Novel of the Year and shortlisted for the Booker Prize), Being Dead (winner of the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award), Harvest (shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize and winner of the International Dublin Literary Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) and The Melody. He lives in Worcestershire.

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    Reviews for The Pesthouse

    3.5/5

    287 ratings29 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This is an odd little backwards pioneer story. A few generations after the collapse of industrial civilization, Americans are heading for the east coast to try and get a berth to Europe. A man and woman meet in a pesthouse where she's been recovering from sickness and team up for the various adventures on their way. It was OK, but not compelling.
    • 5/5
      Crace's novel The Pesthouse is a love story set against the backdrop of an America centuries in the future, long after some calamity has wiped away our technological culture and the nation-state known as the United States. What ancestral memory remains is shroulded in legend and myth. America has become a thinly-populated land ravaged by disease and prowled by bands of brutal men in search of plunder, whether in material form such as valuable metal objects or in human form as women to be raped and young men to be enslaved. Amidst this grim setting, two young people, a woman named Margaret, consigned to a pesthouse as she suffers from a malady resembling the plague, and a younger man named Franklin, separated from his brother in their journey to the Atlantic coast and the ships bound for Europe, meet and become companiions and platonic lovers. Franklin and Margaret are torn apart when they are set upon by a band of thieves and slavers. After a hard winter, they are reunited. Margaret has "adopted" a baby girl left in her custody, another love story. They learn a hard truth upon reaching the coast and then turn back to build new lives as a family in the interior of America. Despite the violence and squalor Crace depicts in the novel, there are also passages of lyrical beauty describing the land, moments of tenderness and sweet humor among the family, and episodes in which compassion and empathy prevail over the savagery of a land of hardness and danger. This wild and harsh America of the future is still a land that can inspire hope in those restless adventurers willing to push out toward the horizon.
    • 4/5
      Very Cormac McCarthy-esque. His prose is spare but with great intent. Although not as crushingly depressing as The Road, the book nonetheless filled me with sadness and longing, which was likely the point of this fictional tale of post-apocalyptic America.
    • 4/5
      Interesting story, and the writing was excellent. The story begins in an unfamiliar America that seems to have regressed to a pre-industrialized age. Two brothers head east toward the ocean, where there are ships that take people to Europe, supposedly where living conditions are much better. At the beginning of this book they arrive in Ferrytown, which serves as a crossroads for people heading to the ships. The younger brother Franklin has injured himself, and it is decided he will stay on the hill outside the town while older brother Jackson heads to town to obtain supplies and arrange passage across the river. In the morning when Jackson has not returned, Franklin heads to town to search for him, only to find all the people and animals in it have mysteriously died in the night. Presuming his brother dead, Franklin befriends the only other survivor of the town, a woman who was banished to a sick house high over the town to either recover from her illness or die. The two decide to travel to the ships together, and so begins their adventure. Although this story was dark, it was not depressing and had a hopeful ending. And there was something intriguing about reading a story where you had no idea what was around the next bend of the road.
    • 3/5
      A strange, quiet story reminiscent of the Grapes of Wrath. A pair of travelers, thrown together by circumstance and tragedy join the eastward migration across America to reach ships bound for Europe. The rumor is that across the sea there is safety and prosperity. Along the way they will encounter bandits, prostitutes, strange religious sects and all manner of catastrophe. The worst being that the boats will only take the strong men and unattached women.The two new friends must either separate or make a far more radical choice: to stay and make their own Eden in what remains of America.
    • 2/5
      To be fair, this has the potential to get better. But I opted to stop reading. There are too many books.

      How many books have I started and failed to finish in the last 5 years? 3. It's not terrible to be on that list (the others are highly respected), but this one... meh. It's not even awful, it's just dull. 60 pages in, I though to myself, you know what? "I could be reading The Road. I could be watching the Walking Dead. I might go do one of those things." And that was it for the pesthouse, its ineffectually 'poetic' language, its two dimensional characters, and its s......................l..........................o.............................................w tempo. I say that as someone who loves Henry James. Slow can be good. But not here.
    • 4/5
      The pesthouse is Jim Crace's seventh novel, published in 2007. It is another novel, among many, of a distopian future, in which people are desperate to leave the United States. The books contains many story elements from similar novels in the genre, and immediately calls Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road to mind. However, The pesthouse is not as horrific and offers more of an idyll.In fact, the realization that the novel is set in the future comes very late in the book, as the hatred of iron cannot be otherwise explained. The pesthouse is very well-written, and particularly the first chapter, ominous and dark, is extremely well conceived and executed. It is borne of a magnificent idea, and perfectly executed, and seems to be a core element in the work of Crace in its dark pondering of death. Subsequent chapters are also extremely well-written, and th novel as a whole is very enjoyable to read.It seems a bit odd that such a distopian novel about America is written by a British author, and at a deeper level this does seem significant. Unlike The Road, The pesthouse is not all bleak and pessimistic. Various story elements seem to draw on the typical American experience, such as the frontier exerpience, aptly reversed in people trekking to the East, in almost equal circumstances as the famous expansion to the West. The religious sekt which harbours and shelters refugees like an ark, and the procedures to come on board are about as strict as boarding an airplane to the US in our own days. Finally, refugees leaving the shores in ships to Europe is another odd reversal of the actual history of the United States.Various parts of the novel are convincing and interesting to read. Perhaps among the distopian novels, The pesthouse is the most beautiful and ultimately the most optimistic, as the novel opens a vista to some form of hope, albeit feeble. The novel does not disclose what disaster caused the country to fall back into a much more primitive stage of civilization, but, as in the episode of Margaret's stay in the pesthouse, the novel seems to suggest that a prolonged period of waiting and patience may bring better times to the continent, the pesthouse of the title becoming a metaphor for the future of America.The pesthouse is very well-written, and presents a beautiful story in very dire circumstances.
    • 5/5
      If I could write, I’d want to write like Jim Crace. From the first moment I first discovered his The Gift of Stones he entered my list of ‘favourite authors’ alongside Graham Swift, Heinrich Böll, Iain M Banks, Juan José Saer and very few others. The kind of writer you check the shelves for every single time you enter a bookshop; then when you buy the latest book you leave it unopened a while, savouring the anticipation, fearing that once you’ve read it there’ll be no more Jim Crace to discover unless he writes another; and the day may come when he won’t. He’s already hinted that, though thankfully it now seems that two more are in the pipeline.The Pesthouse is not his masterpiece (see Arcadia for that) but it is solid reliable Crace. Reading it I was in familiar territory. First, it reminded me of Signals of Distress though I can’t say why other than a feeling about the attitudes portrayed. Then it recalled The Gift of Stones and it is, in a sense, its mirror image, evoking a world that is regressing. Later again I felt stirrings of Quarantine with the trek across the wilderness and Being Dead with all the death and decomposition. That’s the thing about Crace; his books may be all about different things but they’re fashioned from the same tools. His sentences are short and poetic. His characters are lonely people, inhabiting slightly surreal but still recognisable worlds. There is an overarching misanthropy, tempered by great affection for individual characters.Crace described Pesthouse as follows:The novel provides America not with a science fiction future but with something that it has always wanted and lacked – a medieval “past”, an ancient European experience.In some ways we’ve been there many times before in science fiction, and also in westerns. It’s the post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max inhabited by the grubby frontier people of High Plains Drifter but without any heroic ‘man-with-no-name’ to take revenge on wrong-doers. This is a western told in the European style. Cormac McCarthy came close in The Border Trilogy but ultimately Crace’s characters, timid, fearful and chaste, strike me as most believable.
    • 3/5
      I read the first few chapters and simply couldn't understand the author's vernacular. Therefore, I had a hard time getting into the story and couldn't finish it. To be fair, I give this a 3-star rating (It's OK). It's not a bad story, but it doesn't appear to be exciting either. If you are not use to Crace's unique style of writing you will likely have a difficult time understanding The Pesthouse like I did.
    • 1/5
      I didn't like this book for several reasons. I think the post-apocalyptic dystopian novel has been done much better (and with nearly identical plot) many times before. The author also kept me at arm's length from the characters, I think because of the formality of his prose. The book seemed mannered, self-conscious, and pedestrian all at once. I found the characters likable enough but not compelling.
    • 3/5
      I liked the writing just fine but I thought the plot was such a stereotypical post-apocalyptic novel that it left me with no special feelings.
    • 4/5
      America, generations after some sort of ecological(?) disaster is emptying out. The remnant people who are left are wandering, family by family, toward the east coast hoping for transport across the ocean. I found this a warmer and less hopeless book than "The Road" to which it is often compared. I enjoyed the strong female characters and the slow-developing relationship between Franklin and Margaret. My major complaint is that it seems incomplete -- I want to know the rest of their story, and I would have liked more exposition of the background of the story.
    • 1/5
      For the most part I don’t like giving bad reviews. Sure there are books that deserve it, books that are all the craze and might’ve been written by a middle schooler (Fifty Shades…, I’m looking at you). But then there are books that are “written well” but lack any semblance of plot, character development, conflict, setting, joy, pain, life. I hate to group this sort of book with those I previously mentioned, but the truth is, this “well written book” is as difficult to read as the one that should be packing material.

      The Pesthouse lacks everything a novel needs with the exception of well-orchestrated sentences. The story, what little bit of it there is, is told in the most clinical fashion; it was more like reading a psychologist’s report of the incidents than reading a novel. The characters were drab and unbelievable—they wouldn’t survive a day in this post-apocalyptic world. The dialogue was painful—why has the “end of the world” reverted the speech of people to Pioneer-speak? In short, I recognize that Jim Crace can write a sentence, but that doesn’t keep The Pesthouse from being extremely boring.

      The best thing about this book is the cover of the hardback edition. I love this cover. Love it. It’s simple, but so elegant. The texture of the cover is unique, a very dull, old-fashioned paper with raised glossy print. The typeface is clear, demanding but not overpowering. The black and white imagery stands out in its simplicity. It is a wonderful book to hold and to gaze at; unfortunately, I wish I would’ve left it on my shelf unread, because despite its beauty, I now know of the great dissatisfaction that resides between its handsome covers.

      Beautiful Cover Intriguing Synopsis ≠ Guaranteed Enjoyable Read
    • 4/5
      Poor Jim Crace. Almost every review I’ve read of this book compares it to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and I’m going to do the same. Can’t help it. They’re both novels set in post-apocalyptic America with two people struggling to get to the coast, and they both came out at about the same time too. And to me, The Road was better. It was just a brilliant novel, one of the best I’ve read in years. The Pesthouse was good, but suffers from the comparison.Whereas The Road is set within living memory of the mysterious disaster that destroyed civilisation, The Pesthouse is set long after. The cities and highways of our present world have mostly disappeared, and the few remaining ruins are complete mysteries to the future inhabitants. They look at the rusty hulks of sunken ships, for example, and think how stupid their ancestors must have been to try to sail something so heavy, which obviously sank before it left the shore.It’s a story of return – the futuristic America is reminiscent of the America of the past, and everyone is now migrating east towards the hope of sailing to foreign lands, a reversal of the great westward migration of the 19th century. It’s also a love story, as Franklin and Margaret travel together, surviving separation and all kinds of travails to keep pushing east. With their families killed and with violence and depravity all around them, their love is about all they have to cling onto.Perhaps the reason I didn’t love it as much as The Road was about the language. Cormac McCarthy used a beautifully spare style, and I found it really mesmerising. It was understated, allowing the horror of the situation to speak for itself. Here there is more description, more emotion in the language, and it leaves less to the imagination. Also the relationship between the boy and his father in The Road was touching and believable, whereas the relationship between Franklin and Margaret here feels a little predictable – you know as soon as they meet that they’re going to fall in love, and that even if they get separated in the vast expanse of America with no way to contact each other, they’ll miraculously find each other again.I’m making it sound as if I didn’t like the book. That’s not true. I liked it well enough, but it just didn’t blow me away as The Road did (there, I mentioned it again!). I don’t regret reading it, but I wouldn’t strongly recommend it to others.
    • 5/5
      The Pesthouse by Jim Crace is the riveting tale of Margaret and Franklin, two strangers who meet up on a journey "East" to catch a ship away from a barren, devastated, and poor post-apocalyptic America. Margaret comes down with the flux, and is left to live or die in the Pesthouse, where Franklin meets up with her. Their relationship unfolds as the story unfolds, with them learning to trust and depend upon each other. Crace's writing is lyrical and poetic, and the relationship between the main characters is touching and authentic. America's devastated landscape takes back seat to the human drama that emerges during their journey. A thought provoking, gorgeously written story.
    • 2/5
      This book came out around the same time as The Road. Not to draw comparisons, but The Road is far better. I couldn't help thinking throughout the book that Crace, being a British novelist, couldn't quite grasp an America in the clutches of the apocalypse.
    • 3/5
      This book was as much about the budding relationship between Franklin and Margaret as it was about their struggle to make it to the eastern coastline. It was an interesting read, although there are definitely better post-apocalyptic, plague-stricken America type books out there. I did like that even though the story occurs years and years in the future, when our buildings and roads are in ruins and factory made items are rare treasures, it feels like the past. The men all wear beards and the women all wear dresses, people travel on foot or by horse and cart, etc.
    • 4/5
      First Line: Everybody died at night.In the fishing village along the riverbank-- a place called Ferrytown that likes to charge exorbitant fees to any stranger traveling through-- Margaret is showing definite signs of sickness. Her head is shaved, and she is taken to a small stone cottage where she is left to recover... or to die. She is found by a young man named Franklin, and together they begin a long journey through an America laid waste by this disease they call the flux. Margaret and Franklin will be traveling through an America reduced to medieval methods of living where everyone hopes to make it to the East Coast to pay for passage on a ship bound for Europe-- the Promised Land. The couple will have many adventures along the way.Crace swiftly sets the tone of his book and makes his readers uneasy in the prologue: "This used to be America, this river crossing in the ten-month stretch of land, this sea-to-sea. It used to be the safest place on earth." Franklin is young and impulsive, which soon leads to trouble. Margaret is older and used to staying beneath the radar. She is the more observant and adaptable one. As they pass the rusted-out hulks of factories and the weed-choked arteries of disused highways, Crace leads us further and further away from our traditional American values of progress, technology and industriousness.It is an engrossing journey, but one that I never completely believed. Although I liked the characters of Margaret and Franklin, and I found Crace's view of an America forgotten by history to be quite interesting, I felt as though I were being held at a distance... as though I had the flux. If not for that No Man's Land between the characters and me, I would rate this book even higher. Unfortunately, this lover of dystopian fiction felt a bit quarantined.
    • 3/5
      I found this book quite engaging. At first you think that the book is set in the 1800s, pioneers in the mid-West of America heading East for better fortune after an apocalypse of some sort. However the more we get into the story it seems that in fact we are some time in the future but America has gone back to basics, clothes, transport, living, even the dialect is 1800s. THe story is interesting enough but the parallels with The Road by Cormack McCarthy are very obvious. Both books revolve around a family unit escaping from an apocalyptic event across a grey landscape. The meet a group of bandits along the way, they travel along a road to the East to the sea, which is a symbol of hope. Only in both novels the main characters are disappointed when they reach the sea. It is not the gateway to a better life that they both expected. I had to check which novel was written first to see who might have influenced who (The Road was first, published in 2006). Still, I enjoyed The Pesthouse. A little simple, the plot takes a few big jumps along the way. I'm glad I read it and it kept me interested to the end.
    • 1/5
      Terrible book. I listened to the book on tape version narrated by Michael Kramer whom I disliked immensely. The only reason I finished it was lack of other distractions on a long road trip. The story about a future America where machines have stopped and everyone has regressed to the the early 1800s, but with lawlessness, is unimaginative and boring.
    • 4/5
      They say that you should never judge a book by its cover, but never mention the seduction of a great title. I have been lured in by many a lovely title only to have the content be merely adequate, as if the only thing they had was the title and the rest of the story was just an afterthought. I almost did not read Pesthouse because of its non-cozy title. One would think that for a girl who loves apocalypse non-cozy is a must, but no. Beauty, art and well crafted prose are still a requirement. The book told a simple story of two people who struggle to survive, struggle with love, and struggle with remaining true in a world where survival has altered what we as a people once were. It really is a tender tale with questions on what America used to be artfully mixed in. They marveled at destroyed cities, and pondered the use of unknown items. The characters were adults and had known only the destroyed world, yet no crazy, absurd mysticism had sprouted up and rules of polite society still existed. The bad is there, yet not the ugly and heavy handed evil that so many authors love to use when talking about how we as humans will decline. Our characters Margaret and Pigeon have their flaws, their vanities, their skills, and their stupidities, yet you fall in love with them as their mix of innocence and knowledge of the struggle to survive carries them across America. The journey is a common theme in apocalypse novels. It has been done over and over, and I groaned just a bit when my characters set off to the unknown sea for a boat that would take them to a new America. Usually stories use this time to show just how destroyed the world is, and the characters almost always face more violence, more ugliness and more evil as they travel. The end of the journey is the end of the book, and we are all thankful that it is over. It is in a way a natural progression through a story, and it has been abused by many, many writers. Yet this story seemed valid to me. The agonies, struggles and beauties that were happened upon as they journeyed seemed to tell a truer tale then the oh so popular The Road to me. I felt as if I was following immigrants trying to make it to a new world. Their wonder and learning was not foolish, or overdone. The hardships faced were not raving lunatics or half mad cannibals. I am glad that the harsh title did not turn me away. Inside I found a tale that answered the questions on what we could become if the big bad happened with optimism, bravery, a fair bit of luck, and a smidge of old fashioned romanticism.
    • 3/5
      In a post-apocalyptic America, two people set out for the coast in search of salvation...I always like to read at least two books like that every year!In Crace's world, the apocalyptic event seemingly happened centuries ago. The earth is not destroyed, but human civilization, at least in America, has reverted to something older than medieval. There is no technology, no literacy, no rule of law, let alone a central government. Franklin, a tall, gentle man, sets out on a dangerous journey to the coast in hope of setting sail for Europe, where life is reportedly better. He meets a woman, Margaret who is recovering from a deadly plague, and they decide to travel together. Crace's novel has much more action and much more color than The Road, if not the same depth. Crace does a superb job of creating his world. I really got immersed in the book, and I developed a great affection for Franklin and Margaret.
    • 5/5
      An extremely engaging novel of a national disaster that has reduced the United States to a level of barbarism, with strong characterization and Crace's usual masterful style. Indomitable human spirit.
    • 2/5
      I was really disappointed by this book. Don't get me wrong, it was certainly readable, it just felt very lacking in substance. The premise was interesting enough to pique my interest - a journey across America now reduced to a new dark ages after some Apocalyptic event. But what this event happened to be was never explained, and that really bugged me; war was hinted at, but there was no real history, no real backstory as to why all of a sudden all technology was abandoned and everyone was fleeing their miserable, peasant-like existence for Europe, and that made it all the less credible. Also, the characters, people and places seemed very empty. I found it very hard to care about or get to know the two main protagonists, and all the other characters seemed terribly grey and ineffectual. I didn't feel as if learnt anything about the people, places or society in this new America, and everything felt very glossed over or convenient. The language was occasionally pretentious, as if trying to be profound or dramatic with long, often confusing, run on sentences that detracted rather than added to the prose and the plot felt like it kind of just "happened" rather than taking me on a journey. Essentially, this was boy-meets-girl, they lose each other, they find each other, the end. Shame what happened in between was so bland. But this is sounding too much like a hatchet job; if you're looking for what is essentially a love story in a different setting, maybe this one's for you. For me, I like my post-apocalyptic literature a little more meatier.
    • 4/5
      Atmospheric, upsetting story, told well. The degeneration of society is depicted in realistically disturbing way. It sometimes feels like a jump back in time instead of ahead some unknown number of years.
    • 4/5
      North America thrown back to middle ages conditions, adventures of a young man and woman
    • 3/5
      I heard about The Pesthouse on The Diane Rehm Show. I thought the author sounded really interesting and the plot fascinating. But it turns out that the story is about as strong as Diane’s voice. (Oh no he didn’t!) (Oh yes I did!) Anyway, the story really doesn’t go anywhere and seems to get bogged down with narrative. I honestly can’t find anything remarkable about the book. At the same time, I can’t find anything remarkably terrible about it either. I guess I’d say that reading it was like being in zero gravity. (as if I have a clue what that’s really like.) Nothing pulled me one way or another. A very average story.
    • 5/5
      I came to think of this book as more of a love story than anything else. It is the story of Margaret and Franklin (her 'Pigeon') — a man who finds her in the Pesthouse of the title. It is set in a post-apocalyptic America although the nature of what caused the social collapse is unclear. We meet very few characters in the story who seem to be carrying on as normal. There is, for example, the farmer who allows Margaret a little milk for the child. The book is dominated by families moving with their possessions towards the coast from where they hope to sail to some unstated destination. Other are those who feed on them - Margaret's own Ferrytown lives by the tolls its people charge the travellers to cross the river. At the port the travellers fall prey to yet more townspeople waiting to demand a high price for what the travellers need. Sailors and prostitutes play their part. Bands of robbers roam the country on horseback, raping, killing, enslaving and stealing. Margaret and the child spend a winter in a Baptist stronghold which provides food, warmth and shelter at a price. Because of the partnership of Margaret and Franklin I found the story less bleak than Cormac McCarthy's "The Road".
    • 3/5
      A not uninteresting narrative told with Crace's customary gracefulness of style and characterisation. But timing of publication can sometimes be unkind (even with the same publishing house!) and so it proves here, since in comparison with McCarthy's The Road, a novel similar in genre and aspirations, it comes up short in every respect.