A review by darylnash
Being Dead by Jim Crace

1.0

Tries so hard to be unsentimental that it wraps back around the sentimentality scale again to maudlin. We are meant to think that the characters are ordinary with human flaws, but instead they are simply unlikable--I felt sad not for their deaths but that they had lived such hollow lives. And the omniscient narrator's voice--ye gods! At one point he describes the young couple French-kissing with the metaphor of a mother bird feeding its young a mouthful of worms. More interesting was the daughter Syl, but she doesn't show up till halfway through and of course the bulk of her story here is a cliched difficult relationship with her parents. I did find the descriptions of their bodies decaying fascinating, but I could have done without the bland narrative tacked onto the non-fiction.