Being Dead by Jim Crace
What did it win?
National Book Critics Circle Award 2000
What's it all about?
A married couple are murdered and their bodies left to
rot on a beach.
Was it really any good?
It certainly isn't very pleasant. I say this not so much in response to the
nihilism it takes as its theme, and which is introduced in the
epigraph: "Don't count on Heaven, or on Hell./ You're dead. That's it. Adieu.
Farewell." As if the attention given to the gradual decomposition of the
two bodies isn't enough, the narrator makes sure
to tell us that the daughter's visit to a church is pointless: "hymns and
prayers have feeble tunes because there are no gods." That's it. Farewell.
The unpleasant thing about the book is not this, but the fact that it is
impossible to sympathize with any of the characters. Joseph and Celice, the
husband and wife zoologists who, at the beginning of the book, have just been
bludgeoned to death, are revealed through flashbacks as
small-minded people only interested in themselves. Like everyone else in the
book, they spend most of their time scheming how to get what they want out
of others. The rule in life is use or be used.
Affection, like God, is dead in this world. Everyone we meet is hateful. Syl,
the daughter, sleeps with a stranger for taxi fare, a single act that
establishes her as whorish, lazy and cheap. And full of hate. When her chauffeur,
Geo, kindly suggests she start making a list of places to look for her missing parents, she
makes a face: "She hated lists. She hated Things to Do." She resents
Geo to the extent that she feels she owes him anything. "It was tempting to
get rid of Geo straight away. Already [the morning after!] he was getting on her
nerves. He was a whiner and a liability."
The casual violence of the natural world, the beetles, gulls and rats that
devour Joseph and Celice, are nothing compared to the novel's human hunters. The
killer isn't motivated by any complex psychological urges, but is only another
swag fly on the beach. And even the clerk at the morgue who tries to seduce Syl imagines
himself a predator feeding on the dead: "He'd
like to have her warm and naked on a slab, his scissors slicing through her
polymura coat."
In one sense
Joseph and Celice are to be envied since, being dead, they won't have to
suffer the indignities of old age (and of course their lives were boring, empty
and meaningless anyway). The narrator even seems to get a weird delight or at least grim satisfaction in
the messy end of "our doctors of zoology." The murder is presented as
a sort of terminal comeuppance. The scavengers feasting on their flesh represent
nature's revenge on her too literal-minded servants. Hence the frequent
finger-wagging: They should have known better, should have realized that it all
would come to this. And yet if only they'd had more imagination - had taken to
heart The Goatherd's Ancient Wisdom, had been more in tune with faint
premonitions like the kind you get from the other end of a ringing telephone line.
Perhaps then they could have understood a passage like this:
Love was to blame, and passion. Passion such as theirs, brief as it was, was
strong enough to shake the balance of the natural world, and test its
synchronicity. Where there is sex, then there is death. They are the dark
co-ordinates of one straight line. Grief is death eroticized. And sex is only
shuffling off this mortal coil before its time to plummet to the post-coital
afterlife.
This, we are told, "is a scientific view." I have my doubts.
To its credit, the novel is well organized and doesn't draw too much
attention to its clever reverse narrative. The writing is also quite
effective, with a lot of the low-key, clinical impressionism and irony we have
come to expect from writers like Ian McEwan. "If life was an express
that hurtled between termini, then it had been their choice to quit the moving
train before the final station had been reached and dash themselves against the
flying stillness of the earth." The "flying stillness of the
earth" is good.
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