My copy of Continent contains the following inscription:For Simon,Christmas 1986All the best for the New Year & any new continents you may take on-There's a signature below it, but it's incomprehensible. The copy in question is a hardback published by William Heinemann in London in 1986, apparently a first edition - sold for £4.95 net, with a sticker saying "you can afford the journey!" put on a cover - (someone - Simon? Simon's giver? - removed it from this copy. How far have we gone - can you imagine a brand new hardcover being sold at a bookstore with the retail price of five quid?I wondered about Simon. What kind of a person was he? The inscription implied him to be a traveler, and one who has journeyed beyond his native continent. Did he enjoy the book? This isn't a novel, but a collection of seven stories set in an unnamed, fictitious seventh continent, where old tradition clashes with unavoidable progress. Did Simon take the book with him on one of his journeys? That would make the book a traveler as well. How did it slip from his hands, and end up in mine? What has the book seen? Where has it been?These are all questions which have been on my mind as I was reading Continent, Jim Crace's debut work. Each of his novel is very different from the other - he's not a writer afraid of experimenting and trying new things, and it paid off: Continent has won the Whitbread First Novel of the Year Award, and his later historical novels Quarantine and Harvest have both been nominated for the Booker Prize - Britain's finest. He's an accomplished and skilled writer, and Continent is no exception - the opening story, Talking Skull, a freshly educated young man struggles with defining his future: should he embrace his education and spread ideas and wisdom, or continue to feed on the superstitions of the local, uneducated population and make a fortune - like his father? Similarly, in another story, a village scribe struggles to stay true to his art in the face of profit and greed coming from the outsiders who came to seek him for their own gains. The dreamlike continent created by Crace echoes the struggles of our own world - corruption, colonialism, and the erosion of old cultures by the new. I'm glad that I read it and I'm pretty sure that Simon appreciated it too, wherever he might be now.
Crace is a genius. This is not his best book, not by a long shot. A lot of people think "Quarantine," his fantasy of Jesus's forty days in the desert, is his masterpiece, but I'm partial to "Being Dead" and "Harvest." Nonetheless, all three are quite a bit better than "Continent," which seems rather aimless and doesn't have the explosive language for which he's now famous. It's pretty dull, actually. Please don't read this one first because it might turn you off to one of the greatest prose stylists of the last fifty years.
What do You think about Continent (2001)?
A bit of a letdown after the wonderful Quarantine. My expectations were perhaps not set correctly. The blurb on the back of the book says:Jim Crace's internationally acclaimed first book explores the tribes and communities, conflicts and superstitions, flora and fauna of a wholly spellbinding place: an imaginary seventh continent.For some reason, I was expecting something more magical, more mysterious. Something like, I don't know, rivers made up of rolling rocks. The imaginary seventh continent (wait, aren't there seven real continents?) is instead rather ordinary.
—Lauren
