Being Dead was published by Viking in 1999 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Joseph and Celice, middle-aged zoologists, are murdered on a sand dune — bludgeoned by a thief. The novel tells their story in three interlocking timelines: forward from the discovery of their bodies through six days of decomposition; backward through the day of their deaths to the morning they set out; and further back still, to the day thirty years earlier when they first met and made love on the same dunes.
The decomposition sequences are extraordinary: Crace describes with precise, unsentimental beauty the physical processes by which bodies return to the earth — the insects, the bacteria, the chemistry of putrefaction. These passages are not grotesque but lyrical; Crace insists that decomposition is not degradation but transformation, the body returning its borrowed materials to the ecosystem from which they came.
The backward-running narrative of the couple’s last day creates unbearable dramatic irony: the reader knows what they are walking toward, watches them make the small decisions that deliver them to their deaths, and cannot intervene. The novel’s refusal of an afterlife — its insistence that consciousness ends with the cessation of brain activity and that no meaning survives beyond the material — makes its tenderness toward the couple all the more affecting.
Collecting Being Dead
First edition (Viking, London, 1999): Cloth with dust jacket. NBCC Award winner.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $30–$75
- Very good: $10–$30