SOURCE: Allen, Brooke. “Meditations, Good and Bad.” New Criterion 18, no. 9 (May 2000): 63–68.

In the following excerpt, Allen offers a positive assessment of Being Dead.

The name of Jim Crace is not famous in this country, but he has long been considered, and deservedly so, one of Britain's better novelists: every sentence that he writes is original and closely observed, worth reading and reading again.

It is hardly enough to say that Crace is an atheist. “I'm not even a relaxed atheist, I'm a post-Dawkins scientific atheist,” he once said in an interview with the Manchester Guardian. His 1998 novel, Quarantine, an imagined version of the historical Jesus and his forty days in the wilderness, was certainly meant to debunk religion and the religious impulse, but Crace turned out to be too imaginative an artist to stick to anything quite that simple, and the book developed into a near masterpiece of...