SOURCE: Baker, Phil. “Going Gracefully.” Times Literary Supplement (17 September 1999): 22.

In the following review of Being Dead, Baker commends Crace's ambitious project, but concludes that the novel's macabre anti-humanism and “playful fabulation” fail to match the book's solemn subject.

Like a schoolboy chemist, Jim Crace is keen on stinks. Quarantine (1997) gave us “the devil's eggy dinner” on a dying man's breath, and his new book ferments the “pungent details of mortality,” until they make policemen cough and gag. Being Dead traces the decomposition of two middle-aged science teachers after they have been murdered on a beach, and in it Crace both indulges a talent for visceral nastiness and conducts a more tender commemorative post-mortem on their thirty-year relationship.

Doctors of zoology, Joseph and Celice are an idiosyncratic couple whose love has somewhat cooled, at least on Celice's side. Neither is attractive, physically or as a character. Joseph is a...