SOURCE: France, Miranda. “Supping Full on Horrors.” Spectator (2 October 1999): 46.

In the following review, France offers a positive assessment of Being Dead, but notes that the novel's virtuosity and intellectual challenge lacks emotional intensity.

Jim Crace's new novel features two zoologists who are, literally, consumed by their subject. Celice and Joseph, a married couple in their fifties, are dead. [Being Dead] discovers them shortly after their murder among sand dunes and records their deterioration over six days, until the bodies are discovered by police. By then only fragments remain, thanks to the endeavour and hunger of various species inhabiting Baritone Bay. Crace spares us few details of the couple's decomposition: there is a toughening of skin, a congealing of blood, horrid suppurations and worse. On the fourth day swag-fly maggots emerge, generated by the heat in Joseph and Celice's innards. ‘Long dead—but still producing energy!’ is the narrator's...