Being Dead [Paperback]

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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.

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.

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.