Being Dead depicts a relationship which ends in the opportunistic murder by a stranger of the couple, Celice and Joseph, two zoologists. Time runs primarily backwards in the novel, so it begins with their death.
There is a chilled, detached vibe to the writing, augmented by the choice of third person narrative and the two scientist main characters.
Here’s a sentence from Chapter 1: “they were the oddest pair, these dead, spread-eagled lovers on the coast”. Chapter 2 speculates on how their death might have been lamented publicly in, say, the year 1900 instead of 2000, reflects on how the ritual of mourning, of public weeping was now lost. The book essentially performs the same ritualistic task for the fictional couple, recreating their lives, running along the timeline of their relationship backwards.
It’s lyrical. It’s very light on dialogue. Deeply poetic. The descriptions of nature – the dunes, the ways of the insects etc – is only possible from deep study of it.
Here’s a few more lines lifted from chapters:
“The universe has learned to cope with death.”
“The bodies were discovered straight away. A beetle first. Claudatus maximi. A male. Then the raiding parties arrived…”
“She closed her eyes against the dawn to find to what it felt like to be loved and dead.”
The author is completely un-shy about being authorial (eg ‘Celice, at fifty-five, was hardly old enough to have lost her fear of death’: who could be thinking this thought except the author?) yet he ‘goes into character’ –shows us the minds, inner thoughts and feelings of the characters– with complete assurance.
The two main characters are avowedly boring zoologists. So it has not got the epic-ness of a Romeo & Juliet story. Their scientific coldness becomes the emotional cold of the novel. Yet this reflects in some way the existential cold of the universe, an un-dramatic acceptance of death, the uncaringness that nature holds for the human drama on earth.