Their travails are the universal human ones (longing, loss, the need for love and connection in a world of frightening uncertainty), while their manners, their ways of interacting, appear quaint, if not archaic.

What makes these characters compelling is that we both do and don't recognize them equally. When another kind of pestilence-a toxic cloud of 'suffocating vapors'-wipes out the community, the two are cast together, a not-quite couple with no choice but to trek east. He is a pilgrim, bound for the coast she, thirty-one years old, unmarried, and ill with flux, a plaguelike sickness that has led to her isolation in a 'Pesthouse' up the hill from her home in the bustling village of Ferrytown. To get at the experience of this new, weird America, Crace gives us Franklin and Margaret, known to each other as Pigeon and Mags. 'It was fascinating,' Crace writes, 'if disturbing, to stand now among the bludgeoned stones and rusting cadavers, trying to imagine what America had been all those grandpas ago.'

Along the way, they travel the broken trails of former highways, passing vast fields of 'junkle'-mechanical parts and shattered buildings, 'colossal devastated wheels and iron machines, too large for human hands.' The junkle is just the most overt symbol of the collapse of history, the disconnect between the present and the past. Each year, emigrants by the thousands head east from the interior to the port of Tidewater, in what used to be Virginia, looking for passage on tall ships bound for Europe, where a better life might be found. Industrial America remains only in the smallest pieces: a clutch of coins, 'pennies and dimes and quarters,' found in the pebbled silt of a riverbank, 'a square of patterned, faded cloth too finely woven to have been the work of human hands.' Now, America is no longer dream but nightmare, a zone of dislocation in which the only sensible option is escape. The Pesthouse takes place at some point in the future, a future that's uncharted because its residents have no way of reckoning with the past. It's our history and our destiny all in one. For Crace, however, the old, weird America is not just where we've been but where we're going. It's a mythic territory, dark and apocalyptic, one that seems forever lost to us beneath the slick culture we now occupy. This is the land of Boxcar Bertha, the country Mark Twain captured in the river odyssey of Huck and Jim. Jim Crace opens his ninth novel, The Pesthouse, in a place not unlike what Greil Marcus once called 'the old, weird America,' a nation of folk traditions and superstitions, of bindle stiffs and highwaymen.

The Pesthouse by Jim Crace