"You're dead. That's it. Adieu. Farewell."

books:


	• Being Dead: A Novel Jim Crace Picador, 2001 - 208 pages average customer review:based on 111 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

"You're dead. That's it. Adieu. Farewell."

What Jim Crace has written here is an ode to mortality and decomposition--a prose poem at once lyrical and earthy. Joseph and Celice--or to be precise, their corpses--lie unceremoniously on a beach after being bludgeoned to death by a deranged homeless man. In chapters not meant for the queasy, Crace details the microcosmic biological processes that naturally work their way over the next few days on the couple, who, not incidentally, were in fact zoologists while they lived. Not since Poe has putrefaction received such an elegant and elegiac treatment.

If such scientifically meticulous descriptions were the entire plot, this would be a Nicholson Baker story rather than a Jim Crace novel. Alternating with the chapters about the rotting bodies are two more traditional narratives. The first is presented as "quiverings," a sort of traditional memorial that backtracks through their lives, "in which regrets became prospects, resentments became love, experience became hope," taking Joseph and Celice's story back to the week they, as students, met on this very same beach and to the horrific tragedy that permanently brought them together. "Quiverings were resurrections of the dead"; these memories are, in effect, their afterlife.

A second strand is the search for the two zoologists by their concerned colleagues and their somewhat estranged, post-punk daughter, Syl, who is initially irritated at being "asked to take responsibility for a problem that her father's secretary and brain-box colleagues at the Institute had evidently failed to solve." Syl, too, is (whether she wants to be or not) the other facet of her parents' afterlife, the only living evidence of their existence. "Her gene suppliers had closed shop. Their daughter was the next in line.... Their deaths were her beginning."

"Being Dead" is nearly as flawless as it is meticulous. If it suffers from a weakness, then it would be the only occasional overkill of pedantic passages describing bodily decay; the prose poem flirts awfully close to textbook formalism. But Crace has a point when he describes the inexorable return to dust of these two zoologists, a theme explicitly established by the book's epigraph (by the fictional Sherwin Stephens):

"Don't count on Heaven, or on Hell.
You're dead. That's it. Adieu. Farewell.
Eternity awaits? Oh, sure!
It's Putrefaction and Manure.
And unrelenting Rot, Rot, Rot,
As you regress, from Zoo. to Bot."

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Alive

A beautiful, well told tale of love and mortality told in a rather unsentimental manner. This however doesn't mean that it's lacking emotion. Far from it. I found the book deep, lyrical, and moving. I will undoubtedly read it again and there aren't that many books I will do that with.

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Sorbid and depressing

I thought this book was well written and engrossing, but I could not relate to the characters at all. The parents, Joseph and Celice seemed more like 70 year olds than in their mid 50's. They seemed half dead (both physically and mentally) before the murder! Maybe that is why the book was named "Being Dead". The sorbidly scientific descriptions of their physical demise was fitting for their characters. They were not likable. They were self absorbed, boring, dull, drab, sloppy, and totally un-inspiring. They were terrible parents. And as a result their daughter Syl came across as a sad, troubled, deplorable child. She was selfish, inconsiderate, and crude. A pathetic narrative.

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Morbidly fascinating

I was drawn to this work because I'd recently enjoyed Mary Roach's collection of essays in "Stiff" and am of roughly the same age as poor Celice and Joseph who lie murdered and decaying in the sand dunes as this book opens. We Americans hide and disguise so much about death, cloaking our language in euphemisms or having words fail us altogether as we comfort loved ones "in this difficult time." My recent reading of fiction has veered either toward the slightly macabre and melancholy, or to English writers, so I was drawn with morbid fascination to Jim Crace's "Being Dead". Crace shifts perspective from the moments just after the couple's murder - to the receding hours just before, the advancing hours and days just after, and thirty years prior when they first met. What is lovely at the core of this "quivering" for rotting corpses is the elliptical way their lives together begin and end. We often read to know we're not alone, so it's especially comforting to read Crace's summary of the fragility and preciousness of life - "There is no remedy for death - or birth - except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall."

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

Lying in the sand dunes of Baritone Bay are the bodies of a middle-aged couple. Celice and Joseph, in their mid-50s and married for more than 30 years, are returning to the seacoast where they met as students. Instead, they are battered to death by a thief with a chunk of granite. Their corpses lie undiscovered and rotting for a week, prey to sand crabs, flies, and gulls. Yet there remains something touching about the scene, with Joseph's hand curving lightly around his wife's leg, "quietly resting; flesh on flesh; dead, but not departed yet."

"Their bodies had expired, but anyone could tell?just look at them?that Joseph and Celice were still devoted. For while his hand was touching her, curved round her shin, the couple seemed to have achieved that peace the world denies, a period of grace, defying even murder. Anyone who found them there, so wickedly disfigured, would nevertheless be bound to see that something of their love had survived the death of cells. The corpses were surrendered to the weather and the earth, but they were still a man and wife, quietly resting; flesh on flesh; dead, but not departed yet."

From that moment forward, Being Dead 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. 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.

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