Crace's Quarantine FailureQuarantine is the latest chapter in a literary subgenre in which the central idea is to tell a story from the point of view of minor characters in a famous tale, with the originals' more famous stars taking on subordinate roles. Quarantine tells the story of Christ's forty days in the desert, but with Jesus relegated to the periphery, in favor of many other pilgrims. In particular, the novel focuses on a dishonest, crude and brutal merchant, Musa, whom Jesus brings back to life almost incidentally from a seemingly fatal illness. In turn it is only Musa, despicable as he is, who understands that there is something extraordinary in this young man from Galilee. The novel succeeds only in part, largely because this structural technique fails. While Crace brilliantly manages to evoke the harsh atmosphere in which the quarantine takes place, the narrative ends abruptly whenever Jesus is absent. Musa is simply too unpleasant a character for us to care what happens to him and none of the others really hold our attention. Nor can their stories hope to compete with the action we know takes place far from center stage. Even Cracia's demystification of Jesus is not very effective. On the one hand he describes Jesus simply as an overly pious young man, estranged from his family because of his bizarre behavior, and says of those who undertake this trial in the desert: This was the season of madmen: the first new moon of spring was summoning those men... because crazy people are mostly men. They have the time and opportunity to exorcise that part of them that drove them crazy. Crazy with pain, I mean. Oh shame. Oh love. Or illnesses and visions. Crazy enough to think that everything they did, no matter how vain or trivial, was of interest to their god. Crazy enough to think that forty days of discomfort could put their world back in order. The fact that Musa turns out to be such an unsuitable candidate for resurrection, defrauding his traveling companions and eventually even raping a young woman, is probably meant to be an irony of fate. comment on the nature of "miracles". And the torments sent by Satan to test Jesus turn out to be nothing more than petty annoyances imposed on him by Musa.