SOURCE: Review of Quarantine, by Jim Crace. Christian Century (10 March 1999): 292.

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

This novel about Jesus' 40 days in the wilderness—and the six people who spend more than a month in close proximity to him—is both fascinating and puzzling. [Quarantine] is fascinating because Crace is a wonderful writer whose characters and setting draw one in and remain in one's mind. It is puzzling because his portrait of Jesus and of people's response to Jesus is so ambivalent—a portrait drawn by an agnostic who poses profound questions and gives no answers. Like four other people—two mad, one sick, one infertile—Jesus comes to the wilderness for quarantine—40 days of living in a cave in the scrublands, fasting, praying and meditating by day in order to be purified, blessed, cured. Driven into quarantine by pride or desperation...