Cavedweller

A cool metaphysician, the British writer Jim Crace sets his novels in a prehistoric past (“The Gift of Stones”) or hypothetical future (“Arcadia”) to test out the pulse of our present-day spirits.

This gives him the equivalent of a dust-free laboratory, free of the distractions, fads and obsessions of the world around us. Uncrowded and perhaps excessively bare, it allows space for the large sorts of inquiry that our contemporary minds might find uncomfortable in a contemporary setting.

“Quarantine” subjects the figure of Jesus to the fictional Cracean process, bolting together a skeptical armature out of sound, realistic components. Crace’s realism, though, attracts uncertainty as a picnic attracts ants; mystery is the penumbra it casts, and the more solid the elements, the deeper the shadows.

Not just solid but engaging. The allegory may be either magical or ironic--we have the uncomfortable freedom to decide--but never portentous or grandiloquent. There is wit and meat in every detail: The features of Crace’s haunted world are picked out in lively morning light.

“Quarantine” uses a dry tone verging on condescension, as if narrated by one of those archangels who have seen everything and learned to put up with God’s excesses such as, for example, squeezing his Divine Self into a ramshackle human body. Incarnation has been something of a scandal over the millenniums and not only to archangels. One of the characters in “Quarantine,” a snooty Greek, simply cannot abide the idea, and certainly the Jesus whom Crace presents him with makes a hard test.

The novel is set in AD 33 in the bone-white hills above Jericho, a cave-pierced desert where it was the custom to spend 40 fasting days (“quarantine” originally meant 40) as an extraordinary penance or to pray for an extraordinary boon.

As the story begins, three pilgrims arrive: Shim, a Greek who aspires to success in the holy hermit business; Apha, an old Jew with a cancer as big as an orange; and Marta, a barren wife whose husband will divorce her if she does not conceive. Attending them comes an odd, airy sprite: a mute desert nomad whose purpose remains elusive.

A fourth pilgrim arrives a little later. He is a gawky, awkward young man, thin to transparency. He turns out to be Jesus beginning his 40 desert days.

A tent stands below the caves; it belongs not to a pilgrim but to Musa, a merchant who has fallen deathly ill on his way to the markets farther north. His partners have abandoned him, leaving him food, water and gold; his wife, Miri--pregnant, abused and seething--tends him.

“Miri”--for a specimen of Crace’s sentient writing--”smelled the devil’s eggy dinner roasting on his breath; she heard the snapping of the devil’s kindling in his cough. She put her hand onto his chest; it was soft, damp and hot, like fresh bread. Her husband, Musa, was being baked alive. Good news.”

Miri goes off to dig a grave; it fills with water, a lucky thing for her and the pilgrims, though she would rather it contained Musa. Meanwhile Jesus, seeking something to eat and drink before beginning his fast, visits the tent, asks the nearly unconscious man for water and dates and when Musa twitches a boorish refusal, takes them anyway. Then, in a traditional courtesy, he touches a wet finger to Musa’s lips, saying, “Be well.”

Musa falls into a sound sleep and awakes recovered. He is as mean as ever--his meanness, conceit, self-indulgence and odd charm make him the book’s most entrancing as well as its pivotal character--but he is convinced that “the water-thief” has performed a miracle. It will be a tiny splinter of light in his dark soul; like a splinter, it will fester and corrupt, only in this case what it corrupts is corruption.

Restored and energetic as ever (poor Miri finds herself “unwidowed and unfreed, the mistress of unwelcome lips, the keeper of a wasted grave”), Musa sets himself to organizing a profit off the pilgrims in the caves above.

The desert is his, he asserts, and extorts rent for the caves and any food they manage to gather. When the nomad--whose desert arts are themselves close to magic--traps some bees and follows them to their hive, Musa claims the result: “My land. My bees. My honey.” He puts Shim and the nomad to work and makes plans to rape Marta. Yet--that corrupting splinter--he insists that they all go up to Jesus’ cave each day and entreat him to come out.

Crace’s portrait of Jesus is audacious and disconcerting. A spoiled, high-strung boy, he dismayed his parents by praying all the time; the priest recommended carpentry to cool him down. His 40 days in the desert will be as much to impress the world as God.

After his stop-off at Musa’s, he launches himself into fasting and penance with prideful thoroughness, choosing the most remote and uncomfortable cave, and refusing food and water not only by day, like the others, but at night as well. Triumphantly he observes his urine darkening and then drying up altogether. He has brought no supplies or equipment; it is up to God to feed him.

Crace gives everything a double sense; he never shows his hand. Ostensibly his Jesus is somewhere between a holy brat and a holy fool. Yet as the days pass something else appears. His body disintegrates, but that is not the worst. “If you go into the wilderness to fast, not just your body but your spirit will, against all faith, begin to bleed,” Crace writes; a shivering gloss on the dark night of the soul.

“Fortunately,” he adds--and we do not know how to take the word--Jesus’ spirit is so shattered that it is unable to impose moderation, as every religious and reasonable precept would presumably have him do.

Before the 40 days are up, he will stagger out of the cave and die. Musa and the pilgrims disperse. Have there been miracles? Musa recovered, but he might have anyway. Apha’s tumor seems diminished, and Marta is pregnant. True, Musa raped her; still, she insists that Jesus appeared and touched her. Of course that will be a suspiciously convenient story to take back to her husband. Shim, the only one who refused to pray to Jesus, is also the only one unchanged.

Ostensibly Crace is anti-miracle. On the other hand, what is a miracle? Can these presumably natural causes be looked at as an extension--admittedly nervy and no doubt heretical--of the much nervier miracle of incarnation?

If the author clobbers belief with irony, he subverts--more delicately--irony with belief, a belief in mystery, if not necessarily the Christian mystery. At the end, Musa is off to Jericho to set up as a healer and teller of Jesus stories. For a profit, to be sure; yet the last we see of him, he is being followed at a distance by the elusive, almost transparent figure of Jesus himself--a hallucination perhaps, and perhaps not.