SOURCE: Johnson, Luke Timothy. “Jesus in the Desert.” Commonweal (8 May 1998): 18–19.

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

Jim Crace has pulled off the literary equivalent of a perfect triple-triple jump in ice-skating. He has written a novel that has Jesus as its main character yet avoids reminding the reader of the Bible. Unlike all those lives of Jesus and historical Jesus reconstructions that end up making Jesus seem like a cardboard figure compared to the compelling and mysterious portrayals of him in the Gospels, [Quarantine] draws the reader into an imaginative rendering that is so daring, so compelling, and so original, that in it Jesus really does seem human. The story has moments of pure beauty and ones of dreadful cruelty. But it never loses hold of the reader. Crace has constructed a story about Jesus that is at once utterly different from that...