“Siblings to the empty spaces in the heart”: Space, Place and Landscape in Jim Crace’s Quarantine

Abstract

Jim Crace’s writing is notable for its poetic, rhythmical style and idiosyncratic rendering of place and space. In terms of the latter. Crace labels himself a “landscape writer” as all his novels feature distinct environments that are both familiar and other, realistic and uncanny, which has led the critics to coin for them the term “Craceland.” Qurantine (1997) retells the story of Jesus Christ’s forty-day sojourn in the wilderness from the perspective of a contemporary agnostic or atheist. The crucial part of its story is set in a hilly scrubland in the Judean desert, and this heterogeneous and peripheral place and its landscape prove to be determining for the action and character development. Using geocriticism and Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia as its theoretical points of departure, this paper attempts to analyse the novel’s spatial representations and demonstrates the various roles space, place and landscape assume within the narrative’s formal and meaningful frameworks.