Bookclub: Jim Crace on Quarantine
Jim Naughtie
Jim Naughtie presents Bookclub on BBC Radio 4
Tagged with:
I put it to Jim Crace when we met in Stratford-upon-Avon with this month’s readers that it was a bit of a risk to write a novel set in the Judean desert and featuring Jesus, engaged in the 40-day fast. Many writers would run a mile from the thought. But he is quite relaxed about it – not just because he says that if he wrote about his religious views it would be a short pamphlet, not a book, but because he is an undemonstrative character. He’s not a grandstanding writer, though he is a highly serious one, and celebrated for the poetry of his prose. That approach, and his interest in dealing with settings that readers don’t know (like a Middle East desert 2000 years ago) means that he welcomes the adventure of a story, and is never scared by it.
He told a vicar friend that when he had begun the story, Jesus seemed to pop up and became a natural and central part of the story. His friend suggested that this was Christ at his shoulder. No, Jim told us, it was just “the imp of storytelling”. He spoke revealingly about his meticulous technique, and also about why he enjoys the business of creating a story. “The whole joy of this thing is you bring craft, and you bring an ability with words, and making sentences and all the technical side, to do something which is bigger than you which has got wings and powers of its own. That for me is the great fun - listening to the suggestions the books make.”
The story involves relatively small group of characters, and paints some fairly violent relationships in the loneliness of the desert, which is wonderfully portrayed from the first page to the last. I won’t spoil the story for you, but reading Quarantine for the first time in preparation for the programme, I found it gripping in a strange way. The characters are figures on a remote landscape and from a remote time but in Jim’s hands they take on powerful personalities. We had one reader – she described herself as a practising Christian but emphatically not “fanatical” in her beliefs – who found the Jesus character disturbing, and a touch offensive. Jim took the opportunity to explain that although he is an atheist by conviction, and finds that his certainty is getting stronger as he gets older (he’s 67), he has no interest in campaigning atheism. That is certainly not what the book intends to be.
Instead, it is a book about the optimism that survives in human beings, even when things go badly wrong and there seems to be no hope. The nastiest character in the book is called Musa, who is successful and relatively powerful, and who abuses the women around him. But his victory isn’t complete. Jim told us, “The two women in the book went through horrible privations at his hands. They were raped - both his wife and Marta - but they went off in sisterhood. I hope that people felt that. The optimism of the individual, I think, survives. Even though it isn’t as great and as powerful as Musa’s merchant success, nevertheless these small victories do matter.”
We met at the Shakespeare Centre in Stratford and it seemed an appropriate place to talk about fine writing. Because Jim Crace is a novelist of great elegance and power, with a deceptively simple style. He describes it as a solitary craft, in which he’s searched for a rhythmic kind of prose, but one in which he’s also found great satisfaction. “I think if you don’t make too many decisions before writing a book, and leave yourself open to the suggestions that narrative itself will make, then you will have great fun in this lonely profession of writing.”
Jim Crace talks about the title of his book, 'Quarantine'.
I hope you enjoy our discussion. And for next month why not prepare for the best-selling Audrey Niffenegger by reading her hugely successful The Time Traveller’s Wife?
You can hear that programme on Sunday July 7th.
Happy reading
Jim
Listen to Quarantine on Bookclub - available after broadcast on 2 June
