Being Dead

Jim Crace

Jim Crace's novel Being Dead is, for lack of a better term, an anti-murder mystery. Specifically, it is the antithesis of Heinrich Boll's novel The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum. Instead of getting a book where the murderer is known from the first sentence and working out the “why”s of the murder, we get a book where the murder is nothing more than a mechanism to reflect both on the past lives of the murdered couple and the mechanisms of death by the seaside.

I said about halfway through reading this novel that I didn't know whether finding out who the killer is would make me like the novel more or dislike it; having finished the book days ago, I'm still not sure. The book ended up feeling as if there were a number of loose ends (many of which had to do with the dead couple's daughter), but this could be put down to the author mistakenly giving a little too much screen time at the end to what should have been minor details.

In any case, quite a fine little read, quick and easy.