SOURCE: Bawer, Bruce. “Temptation in the Wilderness.” Washington Post Book World (3 May 1998): 5.

In the following review, Bawer offers a positive assessment of Quarantine.

Though the biblical account of Jesus's 40 days in the desert and his temptation there by the devil takes up only a few lines in the gospels, the story—which follows his baptism and precedes his public ministry—has always been seen as pivotal. Now, in the novel Quarantine, the English writer Jim Crace asks the question: If Jesus did in fact go into the desert after his baptism, what might really have happened there?

In this dry, precise, often hypnotic narrative—which won last year's Whitbread Prize and was short-listed for the Booker—Jesus is only one of several sojourners whose paths cross in the wilderness. Musa, a bully, and his pregnant, put-upon wife, Mira, are members of a caravan left behind to fend for...