Jim Crace, quarantine, and the Dawkins delusion

Jim Crace's novel Quarantine purports to be a text of 'post-Dawkins scientific atheism'. It re-sets the mystical gospel story of the Temptation in the Wilderness into a materialist universe where only the laws of nature preside, and thus converges on a well-established fictional form, the naturalistic biographical representation of Jesus in a fully realised historical setting. The Messianic claims of Jesus are assumed to evaporate under this scrutiny, and the truth-claims of religion itself to crumble beneath the application of scientific observation and the invocation of scientific laws. In the event however the novel discloses an imaginative and visionary realm in which miracles, for which there is no naturalistic explanation, happen. Holderness argues that like other agnostic writers who engage with Jesus, Crace is to some degree of God's party without knowing it.