posted on 24 Jan 2018

Being Dead by Jim Crace

I’m not exaggerating when I say that this novel is probably the most extraordinary one I’ve read in recent months. It’s not a long novel but it’s an astonishingly involving one – and sometimes a brutally gruesome one at that – but by the end you’ll feel you’ve been on quite a journey.

One strand of the story concerns the random, opportunistic murder of Joseph and Celice, a middle-aged married couple who were noted zoologists, who had decided, on the day of their death, to take a nostalgic walk on a remote sea shore. They are bludgeoned to death in the sand dunes by a thief seeking to take their watches, cash and anything else that could be easily stuffed into his pockets. Then, in episodes throughout the book, Crace draws for us the scientific, objective and entirely unsentimental description of the days following their death as they decompose on the sand before their bodies are discovered. No details are spared in the way the corruption of the flesh is painted. This, the author tells us, is their end. Have no hopes of an afterlife, don’t succumb to emotional spirituality – death is an end:

Should we expect their spirits to depart, some hellish cart and its pale horse to come and take their falling souls away to its hot mines, some godly, decorated messenger, to simple-minded for its golden wings to fly them to repose, reunion, eternity?....The plain and unforgiving facts are these. Celice and Joseph were soft fruit.

What Crace does acknowledge however is that he can give them a sort of afterlife by the telling of their story. And so woven around the murder and its consequences is the history of their relationship and the events that brought them back to this spot where they will die. Joseph and Celice are not beautiful or even overly likeable people but they most certainly are resolutely ordinary. They married with no great love on Celice’s part and they died having had one child but now sleeping in separate beds.

The third strand in the book concerns itself with the attempts by their daughter, Syl (Sylvia), to find out what has happened to her parents once it becomes clear that they have disappeared in unusual circumstances. Syl doesn’t live with her parents and doesn’t enjoy a close relationship with them but she is forced into confronting her feelings for them and, at the same time, acknowledging her chaotic lifestyle.

Although Syl is clearly an unhappy character she is, by contrast with her parents, alive: perhaps in a way her parents never were and never will be again. At the end of the book she is left to explore the family home now empty of her parents and she finds a small jar containing her baby teeth that her mother has kept as a memory of her childhood.

Syl dropped her teeth back in the jar. Then, clutching it, she got down off the kitchen chair and went into the garden studio to curl up on the couch…..She closed her eyes against the dawn to find out what it felt like to be loved and dead.

But the book ends with a return to the final absolute truth: a truth Crace has drummed home more than once during the telling of the story. He notes that a beetle trapped under the fallen Celice had not spent, like us, his lifetime concocting systems to deny mortality.

 And for Joseph and his wife:

This was not death as it was advertised: a fine translation to a better place. . . . The persons had not gone elsewhere, to blink and wake, to sleep and salivate in some place distinctly other than this world, in No-reality. They were, instead, insensible as stones, imprisoned by the viewless wind.

I’m a big fan of Jim Crace and I’m constantly puzzled about why his reputation as a novelist isn’t more august. Penguin publishes his novels, including this one, in paperback at entirely affordable prices.

 

Terry Potter

January 2018