SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “Cavedweller.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (12 April 1998): 2.

In the following review, Eder offers a positive assessment of Quarantine.

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...