Product Description

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 that found them there, so wickedly disfigured, would nevertheless be bound to see that there was something of their love that had survived the death of cells. The corpses were surrendered to the weather and the earth, but they were still man and wife, quitely resting; dead, but not departed yet.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #83956 in Books
• Published on: 2000-05-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Lying in the sand dunes of Baritone Bay are the bodies of a middle-aged couple. Zoologists Joseph and Celice returned to the site of their first lovemaking to rekindle the flame thirty years into their marriage, only to be battered to death by a thief with a chunk of granite. Their bodies lie undiscovered and rotting for a week, prey to sand-crabs, flies and gulls, and yet there is something touching about this scene--it's in the way that Joseph's hand curves lightly around Celice's leg, "quietly resting; flesh on flesh; dead but not departed yet."

Being Dead is more about the leavings of death than it is about the state of death itself. Running crazy fate lines between the past and present of Joseph and Celice, Crace returns again and again to those mutilated bodies in the dunes with updates on the colour of their decaying skin, the seeping fluids and the creatures feeding off them. This is not a murder book-- the killer is perhaps the least important character. But Crace gives some wonderful glances at death- professionals, in particular a drugged-up lascivious mortuary clerk; "He'd find his own name on the list one day...Enfin, a name to make his heart stand still. Sincere at last."

Jim Crace is the author of Continent, The Gift of Stones, Arcadia, Signals of Distress and Quarantine, which won the 1997 Whitbread Novel Award and was shortlisted for the 1997 Booker Prize and IMPAC Literary Prize. Crace has won numerous other awards, including the EM Forster Award and the Guardian Fiction Award. -- Anna Davis

About the Author
Jim Crace is the author of five novels, most recently QUARANTINE which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Novel of the Year Prize. He is also a past winner of the Whitbread First Novel Prize, the E.M.Forster Award and the Guardian Fiction Award. Jim Crace lives in Birmingham with his wife and two children.

Excerpted from Being Dead by Jim Crace. Copyright © 2000. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
When Being Dead, my novel of "love, sex and mortality in a world without gods", was first published, some ...programmer on Radio 4's Front Row came up with the wheeze of having the book reviewed by a Home Office criminal pathologist. (Play this game at home: Lord of the Flies found wanting by an SAS survival expert, perhaps, or Jaws considered by a dentist.)

The dead don't tell lies, and this poor radio critic had evidently spent too much time with truth-telling corpses and too little time with fiction. This novel is a gross distortion, he said, while he reflected on the bodies of my bludgeoned protagonists. Jim Crace has either spent his time with some very strange people, or he has simply made it up!

The pathologist, of course, was correct on both counts. I have mixed with some very strange people (I live in Birmingham) And I did "simply" make it all up. I have not hung out in morgues, as some critics believe. Nor have I worked as a grave digger or mortician. Indeed, I have seen only one human corpse in my life, my father's, and that was for three seconds with my eyes screwed up. But I am familiar with non-human corpses, as are most of my readers. Every country walk I take seems to discover the putrefying body of a pigeon, fox or lamb. I do not hurry by. Sometimes I turn the body with my toe or stoop to see the ribcage grinning through the fur, the insects feeding on the flesh, the magpie wounds. I do not find these bodies undignified or gruesome. Au contraire, as the French say in their foppish fashion.

And so, with Being Dead, I simply borrowed this more measured, natural response to mortality and applied it to the human corpses of my novel. And then I added those transcendent touches which dignify all good fiction by telling a few big lies. I created flesh-eating swagflies. I conjured up some smells and colours unassociated with the dead. I fantasised. I gave my corpses "a period of grace, defying even murder." That's something that post mortems never find.

This is my claim: invented narrative is often better at defining the great truths than slavish, factual text. Every novelist and every reader of fiction knows that. Pathologists and radio presenters who require a book to merely hold up a shiny, unresponding mirror to the world should stick to shopping lists and catalogues.

Customer Reviews

JIM CRACE'S TAKE ON "BEING DEAD"
At first glance, one would think this book is a mystery. Two bodies found dead in the dunes of Baritone Bay. That assumption could not be further from the truth. While there is a murder and there is a murderer, the killer will not be mentioned again once he has committed his crime. Because this book is not about their death and who did it -- it is more about death itself and all the diminutive details of the actual physical death of these two people and the ultimate decay of their bodies. Sound gruesome?? Crace makes it anything but.

The subject matter -- death in its crudest form or most beautiful form (however you choose to look at it) may not be for everyone but it is a book that has provoked me to think more on this topic than I would have before. The story follows the death and life (in that order) of two married zoologists who are found partially clothed and beaten in the dunes of Baritone Bay. They are middle aged and the thing that Crace notes here, and is bothered by, is that they were robbed of a "good death". A death where you age together, get sick and die a so-called "normal" death. By being in the wrong place at the wrong time, they were victims of a random act of violence. Because their death is out in the open and their bodies are not found for six days, the reader becomes privy to the eventual decomposition complete with all those insects and birds and sealife that aid in the process of returning these once lively forms to the origin of whence they came. It is not pretty but, in a sense, Crace somehow makes this beautiful.

There is so much more to this story as the author jumps back and forth between their life and their death. He explains how they met, introduces us to their grown daughter Syl and tells the events that led them to the dunes that day -- the scene where they first made love many, many years ago. It is more than ironic, in light of their profession as zoologists, that they would end up in a situation where each of them would have delighted in exploring the aftereffects of their own demise.

There is an incredible amount of food for thought in this book. The author explains that "at least their deaths coincided -- there can be nothing lonelier than to outlive someone you are used to loving." By returning to the dunes in an effort to recapture some of their youth, Joseph and Celice paid a heavy price for their nostalgia.

disturbing,moving,compelling and thought-provoking
Although I would disagree with the 'Guardian' that this book was a 'joy' to read-it's content are far too disturbing and uncomfortable for that-it is one of the most unusual and haunting books I've read recently.A reader complained that the characters were far too ordinary to be interesting.I found the description of the couple's relationship after 30 years of marriage both realistic and touching and surely it is true of most murder victims that the way in which they met their deaths is all that differentiates them from us-isn't that one of the reasons such random deaths are so frightening?Death is said to be one of the great taboos of our time and the uncomfortable feelings this book provokes certainly confirm the idea.Personally,I found 'Being Dead' curiously life-affirming!Don't let the title put you off!

the poetry of decomposition
Jim Crace is a master storyteller. I enjoyed Quarantine and was intrigued to see what he would do with his next book. I have to say I think it is even better. His writing style is sheer poetry - which sounds incredible when you think of the subject matter here, the bodies of two murder victims, but it is the touching way that he slowly reveals to us all about his very human characters. The structure of the book is fascinating, one half of it goes backwards from the point of the murder to tell the story of how Joseph and Celice first met. The other half of the book goes forwards in traditional linear fashion to tell you what happens to their bodies as they lie undiscovered on the seashore and how nature takes over. I think Jim Crace is one of the most inventive novel writers around at the moment and I was hooked from the first sentence.