Tentatively, the two join forces and make their way through the ruins of old America. Inside he finds Margaret, a woman with a deadly infection and confined to the Pesthouse to sweat out her fever. In the woods near his temporary refuge, Franklin comes upon an isolated stone building. Across the country, families have packed up their belongings to travel eastward toward the one hope left: passage on a ship to Europe.įranklin Lopez and his brother, Jackson, are only days away from the ocean when Franklin, nearly crippled by an inflamed knee, is forced to stop. Farmlands lie fallow and the soil is contaminated by toxins. Once the safest, most prosperous place on earth, the United States is now a lawless, scantly populated wasteland. In The Pesthouse he imagines an America of the future where a man and a woman trek across a devastated and dangerous landscape, finding strength in each other and an unexpected love. The ensuing identification of utopia as synonymous with State totalitarianism – the dangerous ‘grand narrative’ of a programmatic and enforced approach to social organisation – was further bolstered with the rise of multiculturalism and identity politics, and their accompanying discourses of pluralism, fragmentation and social heterogeneity.Jim Crace is a writer of spectacular originality and a command of language that moves a reader effortlessly into the world of his imagination. Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s despotism at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party in 1956 revealed the Stalinist-communist utopia to be a brutal experiment in institutionality and caused many thinkers and writers on the Left to withdraw their support, as manifested by a sharp rise in dystopian and anti-utopian fiction and commentary. Author(s): Caroline Edwards (see profile) Date: 2009 Group(s): CLCS 20th- and 21st-Century, GS Speculative Fiction, TC Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities, TC Marxism, Literature, and Society, TM Literary and Cultural Theory Subject(s): British literature, Ecocriticism, Humanities, Ecology Item Type: Article Tag(s): british literature, contemporary fiction, ecocriticism, speculative realism, utopia, Environmental Humanities, Literary theory Permanent URL: Abstract: In lieu of an abstract, here is the beginning of the article:Īfter the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of communism in the former Soviet bloc, the concept of utopia was blighted with the stigma of Stalinist totalitarianism.

The Pesthouse by Jim Crace