Book Report: Being Dead

Being Dead, written by British novelist Jim Crace, reads like the low rumbling of thunder under a cloud-darkened sky. Quite simply, the story is about being dead: It begins with a murder. Celice and Joseph, are found dead in the sand dunes, left that way when they are set upon by the murderer who beats them to death with a rock. From that moment forward, this remarkably written book by Jim Crace becomes less about murder and more about death. Alternating chapters move back in time from the murder in hourly and two-hourly increments. As the narrative moves backward, we see Celice and Joseph make the small decisions about their day that will lead them inexorably towards their own deaths. Eventually we learn about their first meeting, and that this is not the first time tragedy has struck them in this idyllic setting.

In other chapters the narrative moves forward. Celice and Joseph are on vacation and nobody misses them until they do not return. Thus, it is six days before their bodies are found. Crace describes in minute detail their gradual return to the land with the help of crabs, birds, and the numerous insects that attack the body and gently and not so gently prepare it for the dust-to-dust phase of death. Celice and Joseph would have been delighted with the description: she was a zoologist and he was an oceanographer, and they spent their lives with their eyes to the microscope, observing the phenomena of life and death. Some readers might find this gruesome, but the facts of death are told in such glorious prose that these descriptions in no way detract from the enjoyment of the book.

This story is very much passive, even when set in 'current' time, but that (while noticeable) did not bother me. The quietness of the story leeches through the pages and into your chest. I felt sorrow, I felt wronged, I felt disgust for my own fellow humans that we live in a world where such cruelty is not an exception but an everyday occurrence. Joesph and Celice's story it bittersweet and poetic, a story about love as much as death. Bold sentences ("It would be comforting, of course, to believe that humans are more durable than other animals, to think that by some miracle his hand and her lower leg remained unspoiled, enfolding and enclosed, that his one fingertip was still amongst her baby hairs, that her ankle skin was firm and pastel-grained, and that her toenails were still berry-red and manicured. But death does not discriminate. All flesh is flesh.") provoke introspection and debate with one's self.

This story is heavy with geological descriptions, and as I am not familiar with beaches and dunes, some of the meaning was lost on me. But I enjoyed the story and read till the end, curious and needed to know what the revelation was, what I should learn and take away from this story. I think the lessons are sprinkled throughout, and it is the entire experience that resonates its values.

Good read, but don't expect to feel good afterward.
4 out of 5 stars.