Only irresponsible people would go into the desert for forty days

Jim Crace's quarantine or the diary of another madman

David Jasper

pp. 35-44

in: Williams Ortiz Gaye, Clara B. Joseph (eds), Theology and literature, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006

Abstract

Jim Crace's novel Quarantine (1997) revisits the story of the temptations of Jesus in the wilderness. It does not adhere closely to the gospel narratives, yet it has uncanny resonances with Scripture, with the stories of the fourth-century Desert Fathers and Mothers, and with modern texts and films concerned with the theme of the desert. The experience of desert brings the variety of this literature into a degree of coherence. Crace is not a theologian, nor is he directly interested in the traditions of Christian desert spirituality or theology. Yet his fiction echoes patterns familiar in those traditions and provides a new, sometimes uncomfortable starting place for religious thought and reflection, from within universal experience of what it is to be human in encounters with those outsiders "by whom the world is kept in being."