Surly optimist

DEEP down, Jim Crace swears he’s as sunny as the next fellow. He has a strange way of showing it. His 1999 novel, “Being Dead,” begins with the blunt-force trauma deaths of two main characters. Others feature wind-gouged landscapes, starvation, even the ravages of Christ’s journey through the wilderness.

Sitting recently in the sunny garden of his home in Birmingham, England, the two-time Man Booker Prize finalist insists that these locales and topics don’t reveal a dark spirit. It is simply where he finds his particular brand of bracing optimism.

“I was in a graveyard the other day,” Crace says, a broad smile spreading across his face, “and I saw a gravestone which said: ‘Do not be concerned, I have merely gone into another room.’ Now, that’s an optimistic view of death, but it’s false. You can see the comfort there, but the optimism is worthless.

“In ‘Being Dead,’ I looked at death unblinkered.... To find an optimistic tale in that is to find optimism, which is worth having. It’s hard optimism.”

Crace harvests another crop of this sturdy seed in his ninth book, “The Pesthouse.” Set in the southeastern United States sometime in the distant future, this new novel might be his most bracing challenge yet for American readers. It asks them to imagine an America from which people flee to better their lives. Pestilence, anarchy, starvation, -- the great scourges of Africa and the Middle East in the 20th century -- have become the nation’s problems now.

A self-professed joiner of causes, whose political involvement goes back to nuclear disarmament and who has a love-hate relationship with the United States, Crace admits there was a certain political comeuppance to this flip-flopping of the current world order.

Although Crace is uncomfortable with what he sees as “American world domination,” writing the novel quickly forced him to move beyond that viewpoint. “I got all the fun out of that, the removal of the American dream,” he says, “only to have the book make me give it back.”