I have mixed feelings about this book, probably because my own spiritual seeking is a pressing matter for me at the present time. I read in a Guardian Review that Crace is an atheist, and this is indeed an atheistic view of death as finality and the state of being dead as eternal I believe this is my second and now successful attempt at reading this book. I think the first time I was turned off by the morbidity and the excruciating detail given to bodily decomposition. Nevertheless I suppose it might not be a bad idea if we all lived like atheists. Maybe then we’d make better use of our time on earth.

Being Dead is a well-written, at times even engrossing, novel, but is essentially bleak. Author Jim Crace provides a literary “quivering” for Joseph and Celise, the murdered protagonists, going back in stages to fill in details of both their last day and their 30 year marraige.

The problem for me is that the author’s “secular” (from book jacket blurb) view of life and death is depressing. Maybe some find the idea that we live, we die, and that is all there is to it, comforting. I find it grim. Add to my fundamental disagreement in outlook the fact that neither Joseph nor Celise was very happy with their marraige, their daughter, or life in general, and the whole thing is a real downer.