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Palgrave Macmillan

10 Jim Crace: Inventor of Worlds

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Abstract

Giving particular attention to five novels—The Gift of Stones (1988), Arcadia (1992), Signals of Distress (1994), Quarantine (1997) and Being Dead (1999)—Jasper discusses the meeting of worlds within and between which people survive and plumb the depths of their humanity. Though Crace would not describe himself as a religious writer, he works within an ancient tradition of creative and spiritual thinking that includes the New Testament and the writings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers. In Crace’s novels the sacred is everywhere present even when ‘religion’ is abandoned or abandons us. In Crace’s fiction it is in the harsh realities of the natural world and lives lived on the edge that something ancient and strangely familiar begins to emerge once again.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Templeton 1999.

  2. 2.

    For a good contemporary and non-foundationalist discussion of this, see Cupitt 1980.

  3. 3.

    See the writings of Edmond Jabès, especially From the Desert to the Book (Jabes 1990) and Jasper 2004.

  4. 4.

    Matthew 4: 1–11; Mark 1: 12–13; and Luke 4: 1–12.

  5. 5.

    For comment, see Harold 1996, 46.

  6. 6.

    See further, Jasper 2004, 101–102.

  7. 7.

    In his film Il vangelo secondo Matteo (1964), Pier Paolo Pasolini, like Crace, portrays Satan as a grubby rather ordinary man who catches people foolish enough to try and survive in the desert at their weakest and most dependent state.

  8. 8.

    Quarantine has another of Crace’s invented prefaces from Ellis Winward and Professor Michael Soule, The Limits of Mortality, Ecco Press, New Jersey (1993).

  9. 9.

    Kermode also concludes his book with an oblique reference to Kafka’s The Trial, though more despondently than I am suggesting is found in Crace. Kermode refers to The Parable of the Door Keeper in The Trial: ‘Hot for secrets, our only conversation may be with guardians who know less and see less than we can; and our sole hope and pleasure is in the perception of a momentary radiance, before the door of disappointment is finally shut on us’ (Kermode 1979, 145).

  10. 10.

    See also Moore 1992, 3.

  11. 11.

    Matthew, who, we think, was drawing upon Mark’s text, turns this around so that, less convincingly parables are told so that we might understand (Matthew 13: 13–16). Mark would have been a better novelist. See, Kermode 1979, 30–31.

  12. 12.

    For the last, see Crace’s All That Follows (2010b).

  13. 13.

    From, Matthew Arnold, ‘Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse’ (1855).

  14. 14.

    See Marion 2002, 26.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland

    David Jasper

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  1. David Jasper
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  1. Humanities Department, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

    Katy Shaw

  2. School of Humanities, University of Brighton, Brighton, UK

    Kate Aughterson

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Jasper, D. (2018). 10 Jim Crace: Inventor of Worlds. In: Shaw, K., Aughterson, K. (eds) Jim Crace. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94093-9_11

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