Craft and good writing make this book a hit with many readers. Innovative form and thinking prose set the right words in the right places. The story brings readers an introspective reflection upon death, seen through the lens of a married couple whom it overtakes.The form of the story weaves along three tracks: One moves the couple back in time from the occasion of their deaths; the next parallels that with a forward-moving tale of their early lives; and the final track contrasts with the first two the physical disposition of their bodies, and with other impersonal events unfolding in the days after their deaths, juxtaposing untended corpses with their living antecedents. So far so good. But as the actual story unfolded, I started having problems.Now the theme of doomed flesh has been a recent innovation, but only in visual media. I first noticed it in nature programs that show what happens after the kill. In one, about the Amazon, my eyes popped as I saw piranhas strip some hapless mammal to its bones in forty seconds flat. In another, about Africa, my jaw dropped as the camera lingered upon insects I have never even heard of, showing them devouring a dying giraffe in a similar instant, almost before the animal’s head hit the ground. Demise of the flesh is also the subject of the recent documentary about that body farm in Tennessee where the decomposition of human cadavers is studied – you know, the one broadcasting last year on an almost endless loop so you couldn’t avoid it no matter what. American crime serials like CSI now stress close-ups of drying or decaying body parts, meaty human bone fragments, blood spatter and what have you. Film gave us Eyes Wide Shut, in which Tom Cruise leans in as if to kiss the dead streetwalker in the morgue. I used to imagine what would happen at that garish moment if Tom had slid out his warm, wet tongue to glide it along her chilled, bluish-green skin. Needless to say, the theaters would have been packed to the girders. As it stands, the movie was a total cop-out, not just for that but for the pathetically botched orgy scene as well. Enough. What these visual treatments suggest is a market, so it was only a matter of time before writers tried to convert images to words. Crace attempts a seamless stitching, yet the postmortem descriptions stand stubbornly apart from the narration of the first two temporal strands. It's like reading two books. Compounding the problem is the third-person voice. Though understandable, it discourages sympathetic identification. The reader becomes an observer, not a participant. Pushing away the reader as well is the couple, two British doctors of zoology. Here’s another idea with merit: zoology = nature = materialism. This couple expresses perfectly the impersonal quality the author seeks. But their status as British academics puts them in a league most readers cannot hope to love. Nothing I read of their lifestyle elicited my sympathy. Their clothing, housing, breakfast choices, entertainment and all-around attitude were as alien to me as if they had dropped from the sky. A colder and more cheerless pair I have never come across. Their icy standoffishness depicts a slice of humanity so removed from most that it cadges the imagination. This book is about death, we are told, about how life is really an aberration, death our real destiny. Even a baby is born dying, we read. Life is fragile, fleeting, impotent – scarcely worth the effort except by pitiable self-delusion. The point is stated page after page, and even during the same paragraph, wherein three or four sentences express it in different words. Take away the creative writing that covers the repetition and say hello to a 200-page exaltation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.Dwelling on ruined flesh has no more appeal for me in books than it does in the visual media, and I found the story hard to engage beyond a creeping feeling of mild disgust. Being Dead has won a major book award. Its writing really is superior; the contrast of life and death is its key literary innovation. This may be exactly what many readers are looking for, and for them the rest will be secondary. Then there are peculiar and narrowly focused minds that can fully appreciate the precise contents that flesh out the story. So with those two exceptions, I do not recommend this book.
I was really looking forward to reading Being Dead - I read a review mentioning it somewhere, and was intrigued ever since. I have read several novels by Jim Crace by now, and found him to be a good stylist versatile author, with each subsequent book being a very different experience from the one before. That being said, I sadly found Being Dead to be a great disappointment. Being Dead is concerned with Joseph and Celice, a pair of middle-aged zoologists who return to visit the coast where they met as students more than 30 years ago, with hopes for a romantic evening. Instead they are disturbed in an act of intimacy by a stranger who kills them both and plunders their possessions, leaving their naked bodies left to rot.What follows if a non-linear accounts of Joseph's and Celice's life - their careers, marriage and relationship with estranged daughter - and post-mortem: the slow decay of their dead bodies, and how they react to elements, insects and animals now feasting on them. This is an interesting juxtaposition, but the book never evolves much beyond it - there is little to make us care for Joseph and Celice, both in life and death, and the whole book ends up being more of an experiment than a novel. Why should we care for these people? Did we learn anything at all from their story? These questions can be answered only if a book meets the prerequisite of having both real people and real story, but Being Dead sadly ends up having neither.
What do You think about Being Dead (1999)?
I tremendously enjoyed this book, though, it does seem incongruently odd to say that I liked a book about "being dead".The writing is magical, lyrical, complex and compelling. Two Middle aged Zoologists, Joseph and Celice have long struggled with a marriage that simply doesn't mesh. Successful in their field, yet by societal standands, they have failed in many areas, including raising a daughter who is self sufficicent and other directed. It an attempt to find one last chance at romance, Joseph invites Celice to return to the area on Baritone Bay where they first met as post graduate students and had sexual encounters in the sand.Tragically, their nostalgic journey nets their senseless killing and they are robbed and beaten to death in the deserted dunes.While Craces' descriptions of the decay of their bodies is not an easy read, the reader is hooked by his intelligent philosophical rendering of life and the natural process we will all endure when we die.This is seem less writing that is not romantic or over embellished with sorrow. And, while it seems clinical, there is enough character development that holds the reader riveted to the story, deeply understanding the fact that on a bring, sunny day, life can suddenly end.Juxtapositioning chapters between the bodies on the beach and details regarding the lives of Cecile and Joseph lends to sadness, but also detachment. Truly, the characters are not like able. From the beginning chapters, the reader does not like self obsessed, pragmatic Cecile. Joseph seems flat and unappealing. Still, in no way does Crace intimate that their senseless, untimely death was justified.Highly Recommended!
—Linda Lipko
Amoebolites and monophyles enjoy eternity. We do not. We die. We will live longer than dusk bugs - for every bug must have its day - but not nearly as long as land tortoises. We're less than turtles. We have to die before they do. We must. It's programmed that we will. Our births are just the gateway to our deaths. That's why a baby screams when it is born. Don't write that in your notes. They who begin to live begin to die. It's downhill from the womb, from when the sperm locates the egg and latches on.And that's not the morbid part. No, Celice and Joseph, an older couple, and both zoologists head out to the dunes. They attempt sex, and come real close. Then they are killed. Then nature - the sun, the rain, the beetles and the crabs - has at their bodies.That would be the morbid part. We die, Jim Crace says. Get over it, he seems also to be saying. Other than that, their daughter - who never really cared for them - tries to find them when they turn up missing. The police find them first, what's left. But as she wonders if she's happy actually, or appropriately grieving, she finds a Mason jar in her parents' home. Nineteen little nubs. Each of her child's teeth (not counting the one she was forced to leave at school). So, you know, it had its moments.I wasn't shocked. I wasn't grossed out. But I kept hearing that Dylan song, It's All Right, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding), as I was reading this; and in particular the line: That he not busy being born is busy dying.
—Tony
The fact that Jim Crace's "Harvest" is on the short-list for this year's Booker Prize reminded me that I had not yet read his earlier, highly praised "Being Dead," even though my daughter had recommended it to me a few years back (a daughter who reads much more widely than her father). I have now read it and am eager to move on to "Harvest." Crace writes in a style that is unabashedly crafted, poetic and astoundingly rich--the type of style one encounters more frequently in a British than an American writer. "Being Dead" deserves to be read for its language alone. But then there is the subject matter: a brutal double murder, the slow decay of bodies hidden between dunes along the sea, a movement back in time that lets us know how those who were murdered came to be there on that fateful day, and the gradual realization on the part of the living that two people are missing. All this weaves together in an extraordinary way and becomes, among other things, a powerful meditation on death. It is, I suppose, the juxtaposition of a sometimes harsh theme with such controlled but luscious language that makes this book so unusual. This is a book I will read again . . . one of the few books I have read recently that inspire, perhaps require, a second reading.
—Stephen Durrant
