Being Dead?

I just searched Jim Crace because I knew I had read him before; Harvest was such a different book, and yet I can sense similarities in the atmosphere and the way he writes and what he observes about human beings. Not a very cheery subject for the festive time of year, but this is what I found myself reading.

In 'Being Dead' Celice and Joseph are dead, but in echos of Chronicle of a Death Foretold we learn the history of the beginning of their relationship, the fateful week when they met at Baritone Bay as students, and the story of their last day, told in reverse from the moment of death, and how they came to be in that place again where they died. They are zoologists on a study trip, and on the beach in the early morning he enchants her with a sprayhopper and his singing voice, and the romance of their meeting becomes, later in life, something he yearns to recreate, and on that sunny day he coaxes her back, to her death. 

In between we have also a zoologists eye view of what happens to the bodies of Celice and Joseph, as the creatures of the beach approach and begin the process of returning their atoms to the universe. 

Our omniscient narrator begins the story somewhat cynical and pitiless:

"Jospeh and Celice were irretrievable. Do not be fooled. There was no beauty for them in the dunes, no painterly tranquility in death framed by the sky, the ocean and the land, that pious trinity, in which their two bodies, supine, prone, were posed as lifeless waxworks of themselves, sweetly unperturbed and ruffled only by the wind. This was an ugly scene. They had been shamed. They were undignified. They were dishonoured by the sudden vileness of their deaths. Only their faces were expressionless. No one could tell what kind of a man he was, what type of a woman she had been. Their characters had bled out on the grass. The universe could not care less." (p.11)

But by the end, I felt that they had come to care about Celice and Joseph, and softened their harsh view of death, had come to realise that it both matters and doesn't matter, a view that I also mostly find myself subscribing to:

"And still, today and every day, the dunes are lifted, stacked and undermined. Their crests migrate and reassemble with the wind. They do their best to raise their backs against the weather and the sea and block the wind-borne sorrows of the world. All along the shores of Baritone Bay and all the coast beyond, tide after tide, time after time, the corpses and the broken, thinned remains of fish and birds, of barnacles and rats, of molluscs, mammals, mussels, crabs are lifted, washed and sorted by the waves. And Joseph and Celice enjoy a loving and unconscious end, beyond experience.

These are the ever ending days of being dead." (p.21)

Stay safe. Be kind.