Quarantine was published by Viking in 1997 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The premise: several people are simultaneously undertaking forty-day fasts in caves in the Judean desert. Among them is a figure called Jesus — Galilean, young, devout — but also Musa, a fat merchant left for dead by his caravan; Marta, a barren woman seeking fertility; and Aphas, an old man seeking a visionary death.
Crace’s Jesus is not divine. He is a young man of intense conviction who goes into the desert seeking God and finds only hunger, hallucination, and death. (Crace has said he conceived the novel as answering the question: what would actually happen to a man who fasted for forty days in the desert? The answer: he would die.) The other characters, particularly Musa — a monstrous figure of appetitive vitality who exploits the fasters while they weaken — provide a counterpoint to Jesus’s self-abnegation.
The novel is profoundly materialist: it presents the desert landscape with Crace’s characteristic physical precision — heat, stone, dust, the behavior of starving bodies — and refuses to grant the spiritual interpretations that tradition places on the story. What remains after the divine is stripped away is not nothing but something harder: the human capacity for self-sacrifice without reward, meaning-making without transcendence.
Collecting Quarantine
First edition (Viking, London, 1997): Cloth with dust jacket. Booker Prize shortlist.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $30–$75
- Very good: $10–$30