by Jim Crace.

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. 272 pages. $24.95.

BY G. WAYNE MILLER
Journal Staff Writer

There were moments while I was reading The Pesthouse that I strongly imagined meeting the protagonists: Franklin, a gentle giant of a young man, and Margaret, his slightly older, more complicated lover. Alone with this superb book, alone in my house, I could fantasize about visiting this post-apocalyptic world in which America, after the decaying passage of some 200 years, has been reduced to a cruel Medievalism. Death, disease, hunger, and cold prevail. History, for the most part, has been lost, along with nearly all of civilization. Yet love is not just still possible, but essential if the spirit is to survive.

This dystopian landscape, of course, with only details differing, has been given to us repeatedly, most recently with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and the movie Children of Men. But until The Pesthouse, I had never felt, on an emotional level, that I had been there.

Such is the power of Crace’s magnificent prose, which John Updike has called “hallucinatory.” It is an apt description. Even when describing the worst horrors — and there is no shortage of those in The Pesthouse — Crace aspires to lyrical perfection, and, with a few clichéd exceptions, gets there. Consider the image of a dead dog, lying in the dust, its “ears still perked as if his hearing had outlasted death.” These are images — the book is rife with them — that burrow into the mind and lodge hauntingly.

The Pesthouse is set in a country that could, with the slightest imagination, be England in the year 800 or so — but it is really future America, generations after a catastrophe that Crace never reveals. Tools are limited. Fire is precious. Food is scarce and the water’s bad. Travel brings anyone into peril of robbers and rapists. But many are compelled to travel. Word reaches into the deep interior of a great ocean to the east — and on the far shore, a rumored land of plenty, presumably Europe. It is the promise of Westward expansion, turned backward.

Franklin, younger son of a Midwest farming family, is among the thousands who have forsaken meager existences for journey. He meets Margaret outside of a small ferry town (on what is perhaps the Mississippi?). A victim of the dread “flux” (presumably bubonic plague), she has been banished to the isolation of the

pesthouse, the same dingy, one-room cabin — indeed, the same bed — where her father perished, also of the flux. But Margaret, unlike her dad, is not doomed. Nor is she pestilent. Fevered and gaunt though she is, her once-long red hair shaved as a warning to (semi-) healthy others, she is delicately beautiful, at least if one is willing to behold, not fear, her. Franklin is, and in an extraordinary scene where he caresses her feet — which Margaret will later believe healed her, by extracting the flux — they fall in love, an experience new to both. Soon, she is calling

him Pigeon; his term of endearment for her becomes Mags.

They set off for the sea. Months pass. Good things and bad things happen. Franklin and Margaret become separated. Margaret saves a baby girl and adopts her as her own. Franklin and Margaret are reunited — and now, with the girl, become a family. They reach the ocean, which they, Plains-dwellers all, have never seen, and which Crace depicts breathtakingly through Margaret’s eyes: “She could not make any sense of how the shore retracted and advanced, and how the sea could express itself in such variety, now blushing blue, now gray as ash, now green. Its moodiness made no sense. What could be the purpose of such restlessness and indecision?”

But the captains of the transoceanic sailing ships will take only passengers who can pay a hefty fee (Crace’s protagonists have nothing), or can offer good labor or have some other use. Franklin, tall and strapping, is welcome — but not Margaret (too “old” at about 30) or the girl. In the bleak moral climate of The Pesthouse, Franklin might be forgiven if he abandoned them; colonies of women thus left behind, now surviving only through the pittance they make as prostitutes, are testament to the many men who have. But Franklin will not. The three decide to head back to the interior. “Going westward,” the book ends, “they would be free.”

On one level, The Pesthouse works as allegory: an America that has destroyed itself (or been destroyed) can still, with courage and determination, and luck, be a promised land. But its greatest success is as a post-apocalyptic fairy tale — no, a surprisingly tender love story, in which two wounded people and their daughter prevail, and perhaps eventually thrive, in a world I can still close my eyes and imagine visiting. Like a vividly remembered dream, The Pesthouse lingers.