A middle-aged couple, both marine zoologists, arrive at a beach to have a picnic. Inspired by the fine weather and a free day, the husband decides to lure his practical, no-nonsense and detached spouse into a surprise nostalgic interlude. Joseph, awkward, out of condition and not very tall, has always been a romantic. Although in his professional life he had been noted "for his coldness as much as for his brains", he appears to have remained besotted with his wife. Celice is more complex: calculating, too tall, too plain, she has always been resourceful enough to make her disadvantages work for her. They seem an unlikely pair to be found dead, savagely beaten, caught by surprise in a sand dune while making love.
Being Dead, Crace's sixth novel, is as original as his previous works. One of the most consistently interesting British writers, he never writes the same book twice. Shortlisted for the 1997 Booker Prize - which he should have won - with Quarantine, an imaginative retelling of Christ's forty-day self-exile in the desert of Judea, Crace went on to deservedly win that year's Whitbread Novel Award. Being Dead is lucid and unsentimental, asserting itself from the outset, never relaxing its grip. It is stark and compelling, yet so subtle is the writing that none could accuse Crace of being sensationalistic, despite the luridness of much of the descriptive passages. The story, which takes a single incident as its starting point, is brilliantly sustained by a series of tonal gear-shifts and the effective use of flashbacks which take place in two time zones - that of the immediate past and a more distant one some 30 years earlier.
A dramatic short chapter introduces, with the detachment of a police report, "the dead spread-eagled lovers", whose nostalgic day-trip went so terribly wrong. From this, Crace embarks upon a quasi-philosophical meditation on death, and the more conventional forms of leave-taking. It includes an analysis of the way death was traditionally treated, and how Joseph and Celice, had they died less violently, would have been prepared for burial with ceremony. "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".
Next, he describes the mourners: "women first, would come as soon as it was dark to start their venerations, weeping till their shoulders shook, tapping on the floorboards with their boots and sticks. . . the greater the racket the deeper the grief. A hundred years ago none was silent or tongue-tied, as we are now, when death was in the room. . . Death was cultivated, watered like a plant". The ease and near-balletic grace of this period interlude, with its tone of respectful irony, then yields to the tougher, almost businesslike description of the brutal killing. There is a harsh beauty to the prose. Crace - who has always achieved dramatic, atmospheric effects through concrete, if lyric language of deceptive simplicity - has never written more forcefully than here and at times adopts the idiolect of a scientist. Indeed, the bodies of the dead couple are viewed through the lens of a pathologist; the physical sensations, however, assume a strange poetry. The dying Celice is "hurtled to the stars". Death is immediate for her; her husband however, lingers: "against the odds, Joseph came back into the world. He surfaced briefly from his coma - awakened by a rush of oxygen, its bubbles spiralling and rising like the gas in lemonade to pout and burst inside his brain".
His death almost becomes a birth. Joseph's dying moments possess an intensity he never experienced in life. The strength of the writing lies in Crace's ability to be both urgent and thoughtful - he ponders the destruction of the killing, he is fascinated but not enthralled. It is not voyeuristic. The victims are presented as becoming part of an elaborate natural cycle as various groups of scavengers and parasites, like so many relay teams, commence work on the corpses. The verdict is deliberate: Joseph and Celice have been cancelled out as individuals. Naked and denied their dignity, "they were dishonoured by the sudden vileness of their deaths. . . their characters had bled out on the grass. " At no time does Being Dead develop into a police-hunt thriller. The murderer is, in fact, irrelevant, as irrelevant as death. When the police do appear it is in the role of collection service, taking away what has become a pair of "leather water bags." Some of the mystery has been solved; the crime is merely random. The only investigation under way is Crace's search for the personality of each of the victims. Although we first meet them as bloodied corpses, in the course of the narrative they emerge as people, not particularly likeable but vivid and real and secretive - if only in the sense of sharing a secret about Celice's carelessness, which perhaps may have helped keep them together. And with that secret comes a sense of guilt and it is this, and a desire perhaps to be finally free of it, which has brought them back to a place they have not visited for thirty years.
We see the couple, particularly Celice, as self-contained survivors. In one of the several sequences during which the narrative describes the study outing they first met on, there is a remarkable description of a fire which ends fatally for one of their fellow-students. As with the descriptions of the rotting bodies assaulted in the dunes by insects and the weather, the language used to plot the fire's process of destruction is highly scientific in its exactness, but is also - as is so typical of Crace - graced by images of unsettling beauty: a flame stretches "its neck for sustenance like a little orange chick." Having given a detailed account of the destroyed bodies as they pass through various stages of disintegration, throughout the course of the novel Crace provides the small external details which make up a life: a creased pillow, a dropped bookmark, a daily journal left on a patio and swollen by rain. The person who comes in search of the zoologists is their only daughter, who appears to live in a state of near-complete estrangement - not only from them. In the facts of their death she rediscovers her parents and an affection she had forgotten.
BY the time their bodies have been discovered, the "six days of grace" during which nature has been permitted to execute a process of deconstruction, it becomes clear that had they been left undisturbed the elements could have effectively removed them from life without a trace, denying them all ritual but, more importantly, protecting them from exposure: ". . . had it not been for the dogs, the residues of Joseph and Celice's lives would have been tossed and tumbled in the dunes to nourish and renew themselves in different forms. . . a slower journey than a hearse. Slower than a glacier." Throughout the narrative there is a constant balancing of opposites, the relentless progress of natural world versus the dictates of society.
Slow-moving and shocking, beautifully and brutally written, simple and complex, this is a coldly languid, thoughtful, intensely imagined work. Crace has literally taken a microscope to life and death and contrasts the efficiency of both.
On the eve of this year's Booker shortlist, it would seem an obvious contender. While J M Coetzee's Disgrace should prove difficult to beat, Crace and his countryman Tim Parks have surely earned their places, ensuring it proves rather more than a two-way big-book battle between Rushdie and Vikram Seth, with A L Kennedy also confirming her status. But who knows?
Eileen Battersby is a critic and Irish Times journalist
