The realm of Mr. Crace's new novel is the strangest of all. It is death, or more exactly, it is the life in death and the death in life. For the former there are the flies' and crabs' assorted meals – for a moment we seem conjured into a sort of restaurant review – and the minute day-by-day charting of the changes in the two bodies on the beach. Not the bodies that were, but the bodies that still are Celice and Joseph … While Mr. Crace is imparting life, even jaunty life, to dissolution he is introducing death repeatedly into the knottily individual lives of Celice, Joseph and those they know … If the characters...are ostensibly on high-flown literary missions (dying, inhabiting prehistory, being God), their flights swoop so near ground level, in fact, that they whip up gravel, grass, gestures of startlement, and the smoke of human cooking fires.
We start their journey, in other words, where they disembark – which suggests an implacable resistance to sentimentality even as it grants an unexpected sort of mercy. Joseph and Celice are dead, murdered. Everything we'll learn eventually leads to this, but in backward-running time … The time spent with the corpses, as we might expect, is memorable. The scene of their death – they're both brained with a chunk of granite – is handled with a dispassionate, impressionistic brio … Few novels are as unsparing as this one in presenting the ephemerality of love given the implacability of death, and few are as moving in depicting the undiminished achievement love nevertheless represents.
Jim Crace’s new novel, Being Dead, is in its small-scale way a sort of reverse-Darwinian epic, an End of Species. At the close of the book he sets his two central characters, Joseph and Celice, firmly among the democratic orders of the dead … About halfway through Being Dead, the alert reader will realize that what he has in his hands is a traditional novel of English manners sprinkled with some of the props and themes of the campus novel à la David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury, though without the laughs … Constantly in these pages one is brought up short by prosaic figures cast, arbitrarily, it would seem, in poetic form. The cumulative effect is not so much 'hypnotic,' pace the [English] reviewers, as dulling: what is intended as poetry often succeeds only in sounding like doggerel...There are passages of haunting beauty in Being Dead, but there are moments, too, when the poetry overwhelms the sense.
Being Dead takes off on a more eccentric course, swerving backward and forward in time in order to put these two deaths in context. The result is an odd, gorgeously written but curiously abstract novel that’s easier to respect than to love … As characters, Joseph and Celice are a little difficult to take — prickly, small-spirited, almost willfully unsympathetic. But by placing their lives and obscene deaths in the context of the larger natural processes of decay and regeneration, Crace allows the couple a measure of redemptive grace, something that might have proved impossible in a more conventional narrative. And so in Being Dead he pulls off a remarkable bit of legerdemain, combining various unappealing parts into a whole that somehow — despite those descriptions of oozing, gull-pecked, maggot-infested wounds — achieves a rough, uncompromising beauty.
...an exquisitely gentle and unsentimental tale on the evolution of love … Crace weaves a story that ebbs and flows with a suggestion that, somewhere within the 30 years, between the original encounter and the final death, lies an explanation for the lives of these two students of animal behavior … It is entirely to Crace's credit that he narrates the evolution of Joseph and Celice with a tidal reluctance to move in any one direction for too long. None of the forces explain their final moments. Not even their chance return on a sunny day to the site of their first love provides a satisfying evolutionary link to the necessary chain of their lives. Their lives, it seems, are as simple and inexplicable as their deaths.
Being Dead is anything but a sentimental work. It is, on the contrary, a gruesome, gut- wrenching novel, not for the squeamish … It also is a virtuoso piece of writing, with page after page filled with harsh, earthy evocation of the mini-sagas of living and dying. Dull and drab in life, Joseph and Celice take on a garish notoriety in death … The universe as created by Crace is ruled by chance, not God. Cruelty is casual, bereft of motive, and humankind hardly counts in the scheme of things … Oddly enough, the effect is both starkly appalling and subtly ennobling.
...a stunning look at two people at the moment of their deaths, [Being Dead] is the riskiest of his works, the most mesmerizing and the most deeply felt … Crace has created two distinctive personalities who sustain a marriage and careers and parent a rebellious, nihilistic daughter, Syl. His finesse in drawing character is matched by the depth of his knowledge and imagination, and the honesty of his bleak vision … In juxtaposing the remorselessness of nature against the hopes, desires and conflicted emotions of individuals, Crace gracefully integrates the facts and myths about the end of human life, and its transcendence (in Syl's epiphanic vision), into a narrative of dazzling virtuosity.
