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March 31, 2005
Being Dead
Being Dead - Jim Crace
**SPOILERS**
Mortuary textbook, love story?
A pair of young marine bioligists, Celice and Joseph, meet at Baritone Bay on a field trip from university. They are both a bit unconventional, and fall for each other almost immediately. There is a tragedy where one of the members of their trip gets killed, and this probably pushes the couple closer together. Skip to 25 years later, and they are both married with a grown up daughter and working together in academia.
Hearing that their meeting place is about to be redeveloped into luxury residences, they return one last time. As they sit semi-naked amongst the sand dunes, they are brutally murdered, heads smashed with a concrete block, by a nutter who only wants their cash. They lie there decomposing for days before they are missed. Once this happens their estranged daughter comes back home and starts searching the hospitals and morgue. Finally they are found.
This is a short novel, and the events are split up and told both backwards and forwards in time. This device isn't really much help; it 's only purpose seems to be to try and spice up a fairly mundane story. A huge proportion of the writing is about death and the processes of decay, so don't read this if you're a bit on the squeamish side.
It is interesting to see how a writer can take something so simple, and make a novel out of it. It is a diverting read, and the narrative actually starts with the death, so the spoiler warning wasn't really necessary as nearly everything is given away in the first few pages. The search for the bodsies does however have a certain amount of tension.
AE2
Posted by se71 at March 31, 2005 01:52 PM
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Comments
Reading some other reviews of this, I discover that a lot of the detail given in "Being Dead" is actually nonsense made up by the author. The sprayhopper that Joseph is studying doesn't exist. And also, the custom of 'quivering' for the dead to help them on their journey is also a fabrication.
I'm not really sure if I like being fooled like this.
Posted by: se71 ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://se71.org/blog/nav-commenters.gif)
at April 6, 2005 02:01 PM
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