An apocalypse without conviction

FictionPost-apocalypse America is the new theme. Writers have taken the events of 9/11 as a rallying cry of sorts. While there is no doubt that the second World War remains the single big story, and continues to inspire fiction writers, a near biblical fear of the coming retribution is also preoccupying many people, including writers. It all makes sense; after all, we have destroyed the planet, it is dying.

During the past 40 years the great JG Ballard has given his maverick imagination free rein. His cautionary prophetic futurism has become the now. Science fiction writers have long grasped the reality of a more primitive life existing far in the future, when the world as we know it has been humbled and is forced to start again. Generations from now, though fewer than we like to think, man will have to return to the past in order to survive in a more primitive way. In 1985, Canadian writer Margaret Atwood evoked a future that was terrifying, in The Handmaid's Tale. Set in the 21st-century Republic of Gilead, it depicted a world in which selected women were effectively to serve as brood mares. It is a modern classic, although it must have drawn some of its inspiration from earlier political allegories, such as Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's 1984, and the Russian cult masterwork, We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, dating from about 1920, which seems to overshadow all else - even something as recent as Ishiguro's haunting Never Let Me Go. Atwood, it must be said, returned, albeit satirically, to the future with Oryx and Crake in 2005 and played the theme for caustic laughs.

Last year, Cormac McCarthy's The Road was published. It follows the tortuous winter journey of a father and son across a devastated wilderness that was once America. It is a shocking tale, in which the father is driven by the fear that his child will die. It could have been a great book, a profound book, but its power is diminished by McCarthy's heavy-handed rhetoric and the relentless monotone, particularly evident in the leaden dialogue. The narrative staggers under the author's belief in the seriousness of what he is attempting and, at times, it falters into unintentional comedy. Now another good writer - for McCarthy at his best, as in The Crossing, is a great writer - the gifted Jim Crace, has approached the same theme, and in a surprisingly similar way. Crace is British and The Pesthouse is his eighth novel. Interestingly, or should that be bizarrely, both books share the same publisher - and ultimately fail. Yet if they fail stylistically, they are important failures.

Set in an America paralysed by horror, fear shapes every waking moment, fear and death. People simply die. The opening sentence, "Everybody died at night", establishes the sense of an unseen enemy. That simple sentence immediately makes the reader feel that this is going to ring true.

Crace is an exciting, original writer. It was he who wrote Quarantine (1997), a remarkable novel set in the Judean desert once walked by Jesus Christ. It is atmospheric, colourful, daring and, above all, convincing. Crace has a feel for period, which he has demonstrated not only in Quarantine but also in Signals of Distress (1994) and in a Bronze Age tale about change, The Gift of Stones (1988). Being Dead (1999), his finest book, is no fluke, because Crace is very good. Since the publication of Continent in 1986, he has proved an extraordinarily imaginative storyteller. All of this adds to the bewildering failure of this new book, which among many weaknesses, including inconsistency of tone, collapses most seriously on its lack of conviction.

To read The Pesthouse is to embark on an experience which consistently forces the reader to readjust the settings. No, this is not medieval England, this is supposed to be post-nuclear, post-terrorist America. No, this is not a sprawling adventure, this is a serious work of conscience. To read that opening sentence, of what is really a prelude to the narrative, is to believe the nightmare is to be explained. "Most were sleeping at the time," he continues, "the lucky ones who were too tired or drunk or deaf or wrapped too tightly in their spreads to hear the hillsides, destabilized by rain, collapse and slip beneath the waters of the lake."

The cause of death remains mysterious, but it is sudden, plague-like. This opening sequence, beautiful and formal, concludes: "This used to be America, this river crossing in the ten-month stretch of land, this sea-to-sea. It used to be the safest place on earth." Crace holds the reader and the reader expects this hold to remain secure.

Two young brothers then enter the stage. Their mission is about survival. A young girl is led from her home; she is ill and therefore a source of death. Every hair is removed - from her head, her face, her body - and she is brought to the pesthouse, either to recover or to die. Early in the narrative, it seems that Crace is attempting an allegory somewhere between adventure and fairytale. The writing is lush and the tone, at times, light, too light.

There are incidents of tremendous violence. The girl, Margaret, and one of the brothers, Franklin, meet when he investigates the pesthouse. Together, they begin an episodic odyssey, the young woman with the younger boy. They meet other emigrants. The story first becomes implausible, then awkward, almost careless, and ultimately unbelievable.

Suspicion and fear dominate. Random objects become important in a world which is now empty. Outlaws enter the action and take away the able-bodied, including Franklin. Margaret acquires a baby whose father has also been recruited into the chain gang. Throughout the text are chance sentences such as "The earth was poisoned, probably", which seem to hint at the darker subtext underlying the story. All the while, Crace is pointing to a lost America. But this book is so English and looks relentlessly to the fiction of Barry Unsworth. Instead of America, the narrative could be taking place in England or anywhere else, such is the prevailing lack of conviction.

Margaret looks to the absent Franklin as a missing lover, although they have been only companions in survival. Once he disappears with the chain gang, the story centres on her. After a series of adventures, she eventually finds shelter in the Ark, run by a religious sect which sees metal as the great evil. Eventually, this eccentric haven is invaded by the gang who kidnapped Franklin. So the couple are reunited. All efforts to flee America are doomed. But the narrative never acquires dramatic energy, much less allegorical weight, because the tone is so light.

Never has a writer written as unconvincingly about horses either. Whether set on an island, medieval England or anywhere, The Pesthouse is a chaotic work intent on a meaning it fails to convey.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

The Pesthouse By Jim Crace Picador, 308pp. £12.99