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The first time I met Jim Crace he was reading his luminous novel, QUARANTINE. The
story, about Jesus' forty days in the desert, is an amazing tale, rich in meaning, thick
with atmosphere. It won the 1997 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award and was shortlisted for
the Booker Prize. From then on, I knew Jim Crace was going to be one of my favorite
authors. Crace didn't disappoint me with his newest novel, BEING DEAD, a bare, honest
novel but one filled with life and color (however dark those colors might be).
What makes Crace one of the most gifted writers today is his ability to write with such
clarity, his ability to write about a setting or a character's appearance, actions,
thoughts, or ideas in a sentence --- or less. BEING DEAD could easily be twice as long as
it is, but the language is direct and sincere, almost to the point of being unsettling to
a reader who usually prefers books in which the subject matter is coddled and cajoled to
their liking.
Joseph and Celice, married for almost 30 years, are murdered in the dunes on Baritone Bay.
The bodies aren't found for several days. Bugs and birds and crabs begin to eat at their
corpses. Their daughter doesn't know where they are; and her journey to find her parents,
as well as the journey taken by Joseph and Celice on their intertwined lives, make up the
story BEING DEAD. It is a story not about death, per se, but about life, and mortality,
and how the simplicity and very nature of death has been buried by new age gurus and
squeamish movies and heartwarming "Touched By An Angel" specials.
"The blows across her face and throat cut off the blood supply and, though her brain
did what it could to make amends, to compensate for the sudden loss of oxygen and glucose,
its corridors were pinched and crushed. The signals of distress it sent were stars. The
myths were true; thanks to a ruptured chemistry of her cortex, she hurtled to the
stars." It is not a rosy book, that is certain. Death (absent the black robes and
scythe) is squarely looked at with honest objectivity, in particular the morgue scenes ---
where Crace details what happens to the bodies, what the family members feel like when
they see their loved ones with a tag attached to their toe.
BEING DEAD is also about growth. The growth of a relationship, that of Joseph and Celice,
from its early days of visits to the beach, the same beach where they were murdered, to
its marriage and stability. Also, there is Syl, their daughter, who comes to terms with
her parents lives and deaths. Decay and growth, it is said in the novel, are synonyms.
Nowhere is this more abundantly clear than in BEING DEAD.
--- Reviewed by Jonathan Shipley
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