Jim Crace - Going to hell in a handcart

'My books are are so unembarrassedly moralistic and serious," says Jim Crace, "which is why I'm so successful in the States, and marginalised at home. I'm not complaining!" he smiles, anticipating my protest. "I've won a couple of Whitbreads." Quarantine was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, I point out. "Being Dead didn't even get longlisted!" he counters. "Oh, I have a critical success, I have esteem, but I haven't really got much of a sales record here. It enables me to stay anonymous in a way I quite like."

For all that, Crace is a major player on the British literary scene, and his eighth novel, The Pesthouse, may challenge his anonymity in the UK; it deserves to be a bestseller. It may not do much for his American sales figures, though. Set in the far future, it depicts a broken-down America which has reverted to primitivism in the aftermath of some unspecified catastrophe. Written language has been forgotten, the wrecks of former civilisation are regarded with suspicion and bafflement. So dire are things, in fact, that desperate people are migrating eastwards to the coast, in search of a better life across the ocean. Margaret, a sick woman who has been left in the pesthouse of the title, meets a callow young man, Franklyn, when he seeks refuge there for the night. Ironically, by abandoning her, her family saves her life after a cataclysm overwhelms the village. Franklyn puts the sick woman in a handcart, and the two begin the perilous journey to the sea.

Crace's original idea was that the book would "deal a blow to America at a time when I think it needs to have a blow dealt to it. It will take America from the top of the pile and put it at the bottom of the pile, politically and culturally. It will defer to Europe, instead of Europe having to defer to it. This is what I would do: I would reduce America in this work of fiction, and I would show it as an entirely failed nation."

The book is the product of his love-hate relationship with the country. "We're entitled to have a view of America in a way that we're not entitled to have a view of Ecuador or Fiji or Iceland. There are no Icelandic whaleburger outlets, there are no people in Icelandic uniforms driving Humvees through 147 countries in the world, which is the figure I came across."

Nevertheless, as he continued working, the novel itself began to subvert his plans. "There's a moment when, if a book has any power of its own, it abandons you and takes over. And it became clear to me that what the book was doing was resisting the failure of America. It didn't want me to write this political novel that reflected my anger at America. It was too fond of the American dream, all those narratives we've been told of hope and getting your own acre. American literature is so full of that; all of those westward-bound novels, all of those waggon train stories, those road movies, Thelma and Louise - they're all heading west with hope in their hearts. Even Borat! He doesn't want an acre of land, he's after Pamela Anderson and he doesn't get her. The American dream doesn't always deliver, but there's something powerful about it."

As he points out, classic science fiction "likes to look at the future as an expansion of what we've already got. Maybe a disastrous expansion, but along the lines that we were using manual typewriters 20 years ago, and posting letters, and now look what we're doing." But what if everything went backwards, to a neo-medieval mindset? "There's so much pride and vanity built up in our cultural sensibilities about the value of metal and technology, yet they are so quickly rendered pointless, in a way that wood isn't or leather isn't. And metal gets so taken in to the landscape that it begins to take up the textures of the natural world rather than the man-made world..." He shows me a photograph of something looking like a skull. "I think it's the drive shaft of a boat. For someone like me where the main interest is natural history and landscape, it's fascinating stuff. Now, if you are in our non-metal future, you'd look at that and think, boy oh boy, haven't we moved on from the day of metal? Those poor people!"

Rape and femicide are disturbingly commonplace in this barbarous future America, and after a dramatic separation from Franklyn, Margaret has to negotiate all the dangers of the road alone. She's a glorious character. "Because I was in love with Margaret, and not in love with Franklyn, I wanted her to have all the Brownie points." (If I have one slight reservation about red-haired Margaret, it's that she is invariably described as beautiful. Why heroines always have to be beautiful, I don't know, but we can forgive a certain amount of authorial fondness in this case.)

A love of landscape is a prominent theme in his books - he will never, he says, open a novel when there's a book on natural history or birds he could read instead - and the American landscape Margaret moves through is vividly and sensuously realised. He insists: "None of those places exist, but it's not an inaccurate extrapolation of what America might be if temperatures were to rise a slight amount. If it were set anywhere, it's sort of on the east coast, North Carolina and Virginia. What what would do is, if you go from the mountains and head east, that would bring you to the Outer Banks, which is the place of the first European settlements. But you don't have to spell that out."

Crace may wax lyrical about wide American horizons, but home is actually Moseley in Birmingham, birthplace of the balti. After David Lodge, he's probably the city's most prominent writer.

"We've been talking about leaving for 32 years, my wife and I," he says wryly. "Our youngest child, Tom, has left home [he also has a daughter, studying at Rada], the dog has died... we will move, I suppose."

You could put your wife in your barrow and wheel her into the horizon.

"What, with arthritis? I've got a great barrow, too. I could do that..."

What's so great about Birmingham?

"This summed it up for me. There was a reading which was going to be at 6.30 in a bookshop and nobody turned up. The London publicist was saying, what's the matter? It's inexplicable, and the Birmingham shop assistant turned to me and said, 'what she doesn't realise is Birmingham goes home for tea.' And I think it's wonderful, it's exactly what I love - and what I hate - about Birmingham. Birmingham goes home for tea. And I'm the kind of bloke who likes to go home for tea too."

'The Pesthouse' is published by Picador at £12.99.