Romeo And Juliet Are Together in Eternity

I was looking to read more of Jim Crace, because I'd very much liked The Devil's Larder, a book of 64 short stories concerning food (including a haunting one about masturbation and scrambled eggs). Also, Bayard had met him during a recent U.S. book tour, and made him out to be an amiable and adventuresome sort. So I picked up Being Dead second-hand from Boswells, and later discovered that it had been inscribed:

For Kathy
with my warmest regards (to a New Atheist)
Jim Crace
I'll admit that I don't totally get the book signing thing, nor autographs. It seems like you're sort of asking for a receipt that you've met someone famous, or at least someone involved in the production of a commodity. I guess it's similar to the reasons why people seem eager to be on television, or even to stand outside 30 Rockefeller Plaza at 7am to watch television being made. You can point to a thing, and say "I was there when that was made and therefore I must exist as well." Or maybe there's more to it and I'm just not seeing it.

At any rate, here's evidence that Kathy-with-a-K attended a reading by Jim Crace, had some sort of conversation with the writer about a recent areligious conversion, and then asked him to sign this book which she had either already read or planned to read. Presumably, she spelled out her name so that he could more acurately take it down. Then, at some point between the original publication date for the hardcover in April, 2000, and the point when I bought the book in July 2008, Kathy took this book which had been personalized for her specifically and sold it to a second-hand book shop, and it then made its way onto the shelves at Boswell's.

Doesn't seem right. It seems to me that if someone writes in your book, you are honor-bound to hang on to that book for the rest of your life. So either Kathy-with-a-K is a cold and heartless athiestic book spurner, or she has gone to dirt and her copy of Being Dead sold off by the estate manager hired by her greiving Unitarian children.

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Which brings me to the book itself, which concerns -- it may be obvious to say so -- the condition of being dead. Somewhat like a fictional treatment of Mary Roach's Stiff, a book my wife loaned to me after our first date*, Being Dead follows the story of the bodies of two zoologists from the time of their brutal murder on the dunes of Baritone Bay to their ultimate discovery and removal by the police and the coroner. It's sort of an anti-mystery, in that the murder is sort of besides-the-point, unsolveable and unsolved -- death, in this book, is a matter not of spirituality or deductive procedure but of zoology. Sentimentality is abolutely avoided, and oddly this gives the book it's freshness and spark.

Entwined in the description of the bodies and what happens to them (or, really, given the agentless-ness of nature, what occurs to them) over a period of six days are chapters that cover their earlier lives and chapters that work backwards in time on the day of the couples murder. None of this is driven very much by suspense or the urge to see what happens (which we already know, anyway). Instead, the driver here is Crace's skill with the language; he's able to describe the rupture of human flesh by violence in a way that is both beautiful and repulsive. He has a particular capacity for writing about nature -- the work of beetles and gulls, wind and waves. The book's setting -- Baritone Bay -- could exist on the coast of California or Massachusetts, in the south of England or western Australia, and yet it's desciption is precise and specific. One's never quite sure whether the insects and vegetation he describes actually exist, but his authority is such that we are able to see them anyway.

Ultimately, we're left with a sense of the beach as a landscape built and dependent upon death -- discarded shells, bones of fish pushed out of the sea, bits of oysters dropped by a gull, etc. -- so that this place we view as serene and peaceful is also the locale of a primal and vicious nature. (As you may know from a previous post, I had to take a break from this relatiely short -- 196 pages -- book in order to take in something lightweight and funny.)

I've probably gone on enough about death, and will now have to post up a weeks' worht of pictures of my beautiful and hilarious children to make up for it. Goodnight, Kathy-with-a-K, wherever you are.