Being Dead

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 wasn’t very pleasant, and I say this not just 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.