Books: A Bit Of Gospel Shtick

It takes the Gospel According to Matthew fewer than 50 lines to deal with Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness, about double the length of the following un-King Jamesian summary: the newly baptized Galilean retreats to the Judean desert where he is mocked and enticed by the devil; Jesus does not take the bait; he won’t turn stones into bread because man does not live by bread alone; he won’t jump from the temple tower to prove his divinity because it is forbidden to presume God’s protection; finally, he rejects the Faustian bargain–the world’s riches for his soul.

Jim Crace’s Quarantine (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 243 pages; $23) novelizes the Temptations of Christ, adding a plot bubbling with sin and a supporting cast of odd pilgrims. Crace, a British journalist turned novelist (The Gift of Stones, Continent), is not the first writer to take fictional liberties with Scripture. He won’t be the last. But his new effort proves to be one of the more successful reimaginings. Readers and critics in Britain thought so: when Quarantine was published there last year, it was short-listed for the Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award.

Crace’s portrayal of Jesus combines eerie realism with supernatural powers, sort of like a biblical X-Files. At this early stage in his short life the pious Jewish peasant thinks of himself as a gifted healer. Indeed, he cures one of his first patients–a dying merchant–with what seems like one-handed CPR. Musa, the revived trader, is not particularly grateful. His first thought is to sign up the young Jewish healer for a traveling medicine show. Musa is worldliness made flesh, the sort of opportunist and schemer who if asked to swap his soul for profit would probably respond, “What’s the catch?” By contrast, Crace’s Messiah-in-training is a bit of a stick: an inept carpenter with a stuffy nose, a functional illiterate, the kind of cheerless guy who has to make camping out with snakes and scorpions even harder than it already is. On the other hand he has an iron will. Starved and dangerously dehydrated, he resists the tantalizing bribes of food and water that Musa dangles in front of the keyhole opening in the cliff face where Jesus fasts and prays. Crace’s tempter, then, is not a flapping, sulfurous devil, only a man whose demons and unactivated angels are part of his nature.

There is no question that Quarantine is a serious and skillfully crafted novel about folly, faith and a radically new relationship between a people and its god. But it is not a solemn book. Crace’s characters are animated by timeless urges. His prose is startlingly specific about ancient life and Judea’s harsh, terrible beauty. Unlike many authors of biblical fiction, he blends his research smoothly into his narrative and adds a leavening pinch of humor. Musa is like a preincarnation of Zero Mostel, especially when he orders flunkies to push a dead donkey over a cliff. Awaiting a sign from God, a surprised and unquestioning Jesus watches the carcass plunge past his cave opening.

At such moments Quarantine has the feel of Samuel Beckett’s philosophical vaudeville. But that is where any comparison with the playwright should end. None of Crace’s characters is a despairing optimist waiting for Godot or any other no-show. Sacred or profane, each represents the beginning, not the end, of an era.

–By R.Z. Sheppard