Whereas The Road is set within living memory of the mysterious disaster that destroyed civilisation, The Pesthouse is set long after. The cities and highways of our present world have mostly disappeared, and the few remaining ruins are complete mysteries to the future inhabitants. They look at the rusty hulks of sunken ships, for example, and think how stupid their ancestors must have been to try to sail something so heavy, which obviously sank before it left the shore.

It’s a story of return – the futuristic America is reminiscent of the America of the past, and everyone is now migrating east towards the hope of sailing to foreign lands, a reversal of the great westward migration of the 19th century. It’s also a love story, as Franklin and Margaret travel together, surviving separation and all kinds of travails to keep pushing east. With their families killed and with violence and depravity all around them, their love is about all they have to cling onto.

Perhaps the reason I didn’t love it as much as The Road was about the language. Cormac McCarthy used a beautifully spare style, and I found it really mesmerising. It was understated, allowing the horror of the situation to speak for itself. Here there is more description, more emotion in the language, and it leaves less to the imagination. Also the relationship between the boy and his father in The Road was touching and believable, whereas the relationship between Franklin and Margaret here feels a little predictable – you know as soon as they meet that they’re going to fall in love, and that even if they get separated in the vast expanse of America with no way to contact each other, they’ll miraculously find each other again.

I’m making it sound as if I didn’t like the book. That’s not true. I liked it well enough, but it just didn’t blow me away as The Road did (there, I mentioned it again!). I don’t regret reading it, but I wouldn’t strongly recommend it to others.

Strangely, it doesn’t end up being a bad thing. The narrative meanders around in unexpected directions, taking in corn prices, bestiality, religion, politics, weather, corn prices, cowboys, horse riding, the Lebanon-Israel conflict and pretty much anything else you can think of that was happening around 2006. But it does so in an engaging style and with absolute candour. If you can embrace randomness, then this is an enjoyable read.

It’s also true to life. Ford sets out with a clear plan of raising a small organic garden in the scorching heat of a Texas summer. He will clear a plot, plant it out, and tell us how it all works out over the year. He describes his rationale very well. Artificial methods of industrial-scale farming have made it possible to farm huge tracts of land with very few people, but at the cost of massive dependence on oil. Thirty gallons of oil are now needed to raise one acre of corn. The machinery, vehicles, chemicals, irrigation equipment, etc., are all dependent on oil in some way, and the oil is becoming more scarce. Prices are rising, and what happens when it runs out, or becomes so scarce that it’s unaffordable? Ford decides to find out, picking up his hoe and going back to old-style manual labour on one acre of his farm.

For a while, he sticks to this plan, and it seems clear what to expect. You start to enjoy the descriptions of repetitive manual labour, the attention to detail, the observations of things that are not possible to see from a tractor, the remembrance of old, almost-forgotten techniques that assume a sudden importance when combine harvesters and industrial pesticides are not to hand.

But then, as with so many great human plans, things go a bit awry. Other things get in the way. Drought strikes. The initial enthusiasm fades. As the book goes on, the garden becomes a less and less regular feature. You wonder what happened to it, sometimes, and then it reappears again choked with weeds, and then it’s back to some other anecdote. At first I got a bit frustrated and wished he would just follow through with the garden thing, but then I realised that he was just being honest. He tried to raise this organic garden in 100 degree heat, and it was really hard work, and sometimes he failed and sprayed weedkiller on the crops just because his back was aching and he couldn’t face weeding by hand, and sometimes he went back to it and spent all day and night picking tomatoes. That’s what people do. We work in bursts, committed one minute and distracted the next. What I wanted, the perfect story of an experiment carried through to its logical conclusion, was unrealistic. In fact, one of the points I think Ford was trying to make is that this kind of farming is incredibly tough, especially in the drought conditions of southern Texas in the throes of climate change. It’s a warning us about what to expect in the future, when our current, unsustainable practices are no longer possible.

When I learned to relax and go wherever Ford wanted to take me, I started to enjoy the book a lot more. It’s an entertaining read, much like listening to an opinionated, avuncular old relative telling stories at the bar. You don’t necessarily agree with all of it or follow the logic, but you enjoy the ride.

At first the different stories are told in separate chapters, but as the novel progresses they gradually merge, so that the narrative shifts abruptly between the different times and spaces. Even within each individual stories, there are frequent flashbacks to earlier events, such as the Kishinev pogrom of 1903, which Lazarus and his family lived through, or Brik’s early life in America.

It sounds confusing, but it wasn’t at all difficult to follow. Hemon is a skilled storyteller, and although the movements in time and space are abrupt, they feel natural. I think he’s captured very successfully the nature of memory. There is often a certain logic to the memories, but it’s not an obviously “rational” logic – it’s more subconscious, to do with shapes, smells, colours, etc. I was once walking past a carpet shop, and the smell of the chemical they’d used to clean the carpets gave me an incredibly powerful image of my childhood bedroom where I crawled around playing with cars. It was abrupt but made a certain sense.

I think that’s the kind of thing that Hemon is trying to achieve here, and he handles it very well. As the narrator, Brik, does more research into Lazarus’s story, he starts thinking about Lazarus more often, and the story in some way merges with his own. That matches my experience of working on a book – when it’s going well and you’re immersed in it, you think about it at the most unexpected times. So the abrupt shifts from a Moldovan car ride to Brik’s marriage to the Kishinev progrom felt natural to me.

There are quite a few parallels, too, between the different times and places. Names are repeated – Schuettler is both the Assistant Chief of the 1908 Chicago police and the contemporary source of Brik’s writing grant; Miller is a reporter in 1908 Chicago and also 1990s Sarajevo. In all three stories there is an ultimate lack of meaning or even truth – we never know for sure why Lazarus went to visit the Chief of Police or what was in the letter he was carrying; Rora is established from the beginning as a teller of far-fetched tale’s, so it’s impossible to know which of his stories of Sarajevo are true; Brik’s marriage is falling apart for reasons that are elusive.

Hemon repeats several times something like the phrase “She was like everybody else because there was nobody like her”, and I think the parallels between the stories are a way of showing that, although the individual is always different and the specific circumstances change,  much about the human experience remains the same. The Lazarus story is clearly meant to tell us something about contemporary America – the hysteria about “Jewish anarchists” in 1908, the hysteria about “Muslim extremists/terrorists” a century later.  Lazarus is also, of course, s Biblical symbol of resurrection, and I think Hemon is saying something here about how individuals’ stories are resurrected by groups within society and given a new, completely different life. The newspapers and politicians of the day made Lazarus into a demon; the anarchists made him into a martyr. Neither version was true. Yet throughout time we continue to do the same things (think of the “life after death” of Michael Jackson, for example, or Princess Diana, or JFK). I wonder if Hemon is also saying something about the “collective unconscious” – Jung’s idea that beyond our individual experiences, we also tap into a “reservoir of experiences” of humanity.

Hemon is one of those writers who leaves a lot unsaid, and also casts doubt on the veracity of much of what has been said. Perhaps that’s why, after 300 pages of engaging prose, the ending felt a little flat. In all three strands of the book, many things happened, but not much really changed. I suspect that’s the point, but still it felt a little disappointing. In Hemon’s book of short stories, “A Question of Bruno”, the open endings worked really well. In a novel, you invest so much more time and energy into the characters, and it’s disappointing when the book effectively just stops. It’s probably more true to life than a novel where everything is neatly wrapped up and all the loose ends tied, but I still felt that I wanted something more from the ending. That’s about my only complaint. Will definitely be reading his next book.