There are other travellers like them, eager to flee to Europe. There are bands of roaming thugs who steal from travellers and enslave them and the pair come across these bands. The rest of the book describes their adventures in the post-apocalyptic United States. Margaret knows of a secret bridge so that they do not have to use the ferry, now adrift and unreachable, and they set off. Franklin takes a few things for their onward journey – now the only option – and inadvertently starts a fire. When they eventually do go into the town, they find the disaster. They stay in the pesthouse for a while, while Franklin looks after Margaret. Both are unaware of what has happened in Ferrytown. He finds the pesthouse, where he joins Margaret. The landslide is caused by a heavy rainfall so, that night, Franklin is soaked and seeks further shelter. Unfortunately, he spends the night in the town and dies with the others. Franklin, the younger, has injured his knee and finds it difficult to walk, so he is left outside the town while Jackson goes into the town to see if he can trade his coat for food and a ferry passage, which he manages to do. Meanwhile, Franklin and Jackson Lopez have arrived outside the town. She is shaved completely – even the hair in her nostrils – and taken to the pesthouse, a remote hut well outside the town, where she will stay till she recovers or dies. She became ill and, as her father had died of it some years back, the family assumed it was the flux. Margaret lived with her family in Ferrytown. We then jump back a few days to meet our protagonists. The novel starts with the town being completely destroyed when a landslide into the lake releases a large amount of poisonous gas, killing all the inhabitants. The small town has made money, as everyone on the way East to the ships has to cross here by ferry – there is, apparently, no other way, and pay a toll to do so.

Victims are shaved completely and are therefore readily recognised and avoided. One problem that still remains is a disease known as the flux, a plague-like disease. This is, of course, an ironical reversal of the immigration to the United States in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. Those that can, make the trek East to get a ship to Europe where things are said to be much better. Those people that are left live in small towns or even on isolated farms.

Almost the entire industrial landscape has disappeared, with only the rotting ruins of factories and so on visible.

Much of the populace has been killed by something called the Grand Contagion. This novel is set in a post-apocalyptic United States. Home » England » Jim Crace » Pesthouse Jim Crace: Pesthouse

The Pesthouse by Jim Crace