Book Reviews

Being Dead: A Novel

Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 192 pp., $21

The language reserved for the subject of death throughout literature, with varying degrees of success, usually aims to be dressed and layered in a universal and innately human pathos, drugged with a hallowed nostalgia, existing on its own illusory plane of metaphor which ultimately reflects neither the world of the reader in his present tense nor that of the literary construction itself. What the hell, we like it that way. But Being Dead, Jim Crace's tale of two lovers forever lost on the dunes of a beach, attempts something wholly opposed to this goal. By using an almost absurd, level-headed voice to discuss a matter that could drive a human to madness, Crace replaces that language of death with a far-too-well measured and sterile mode of expression. His is a death not of men and of women, but of bodies.

This conceit is not problematic in itself. Throughout the first half of the novel, Crace crafts a compelling rhythm and tone that is somewhere between journalism and science to describe the events surrounding the death of Joseph and Celice, a married couple of zoologists who, on a whim, return to the beach where they first made love some 30 years earlier. After a drifting robber catches them naked on the sands, beats them into a slow death, and steals their sandwich and their car, the author places the dead lovers' lifeless bodies together in a wrenching pose, and he describes the rites that would have occurred had the couple died 100 years ago: "The bodies would be laid out side by side on the bed in their best clothes and shoes, their wounds disguised, their hair slicked back, eyes shut, mouths shut, his hand on hers, their faces rhyming."

The argument here seems to be that such respect for the dead and for death itself could not occur in our own times, that like the language of death, the contemporary view of human decay has moved away from the religious or mythological and toward the scientific. But Crace uses the rest of his novel to push this argument painfully further -- as the reader views the episodes of Joseph and Celice's youth, the underwhelming circumstances of their falling in love, their lifelong preoccupation with the minutiae of zoology, their apparent lack of understanding of matters related to their daughter or people who live as people in full -- as the reader learns more about these characters, it seems less of a shame that they have died at all. Perhaps it is a deliberate point of irony on the author's part that those who have died in this book were never alive in the first place. But if the work offers so little energy and even less passion from the language it creates and from the characters it offers, it should expect nothing more from its reader.