“‘It’s not as if . . . ,’” she said. And then her scalp hung open like a fish’s mouth. The white roots of her crown were stoplight red.” A couple suffers a horrific fate at the hands of a granite-club-wielding murderer, while they enjoy each other on the beach of Baritone Bay, where they first met. This is the premise of Being Dead, from English novelist Jim Crace, author of Quarantine and Signals of Distress. “Crace is a writer of hallucinatory skill,” says John Updike.
The novel begins with the two bodies lying in the sand, his hand latched on to her shin, a symbol of their unbreakable love passing into eternity. From there the novel takes three directions. One is the incidents that lead up to their deaths; another is how they first met, then fell in love, married, and spent the following thirty years together; the last is the succeeding days of their corpses suffering the wear and teat of nature and the weather, as their bodies remain undiscovered.
Who would have thought it possible that a novel about the death of the main characters would be published? Being Dead cannot be locked into one specific genre, but seems to flitter over them all, one minute taking you to the horrors of their deaths and decay, the next dabbling in the moving love story that kept them together for so long. Crace has a writing style that is truly unlike any other.
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Originally published on September 4th 2001 ©Alex C. Telander.
Originally published in the Long Beach Union.
Bookbanter 
[…] author, Jim Crace, winner of last year’s National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction with Being Dead, brings another novel of a most unique variety. The Devil’s Larder is a collection of […]