Being Dead: A Novel

Lying in the sand dunes of Baritone Bay are the bodies of a middle-aged couple. Celice and Joseph in their mid-50s and married for more than 30 years are returning to the seacoast where they met as students. Instead they are battered to death by a thief with a chunk of granite. Their corpses lie undiscovered and rotting for a week prey to sand crabs flies and gulls. Yet there remains something touching about the scene with Josephs hand curving lightly around his wifes leg quietly resting; flesh on flesh; dead but not departed yet. . Their bodies had expired but anyone could tell―just look at them―that Joseph and Celice were still devoted. For while his hand was touching her curved round her shin the couple seemed to have achieved that peace the world denies a period of grace defying even murder. Anyone who found them there so wickedly disfigured would nevertheless be bound to see that something of their love had survived the death of cells. The corpses were surrendered to the weather and the earth but they were still a man and wife quietly resting; flesh on flesh; dead but not departed yet.. From that moment forward Being Dead becomes less about murder and more about death. Alternating chapters move back in time from the murder in hourly and two-hourly increments. As the narrative moves backward we see Celice and Joseph make the small decisions about their day that will lead them inexorably towards their own deaths. In other chapters the narrative moves forward. Celice and Joseph are on vacation and nobody misses them until they do not return. Thus it is six days before their bodies are found. Crace describes in minute detail their gradual return to the land with the help of crabs birds and the numerous insects that attack the body and gently and not so gently prepare it for the dust-to-dust phase of death.