Book Review: Dead

I found out about Dead by Jim Crace thanks to the author of the Kite Runner mentioning it as one of his current favorites.

Dead is a very unusual book. First, the focus of the story is a married couple that has been murdered on a beach. It sounds pretty gruesome, and I guess in some ways it is, but Crace manages to weave his tale in such an interesting and matter-of-fact way, that the details aren't as shocking as they might be in the hands of a different author.

The story is told in pieces that go in an odd order. We get some history from back before the married couple got together, we learn about various times in their marriage, we learn about their daughter, we learn about the events that brought them to the beach that day. But we don't get any of it in chronological order. Crace skillfully feeds us the details in an order that serves his purpose, and does it all without confusing the reader too much with all the shifting timetables.

The other interesting vehicle in this book is that we get the story from the perspective of several different characters: the husband, the wife, the murdered, and daughter. A lot of books do this, but I found the style in which it was done in Dead to be different from what I've seen before.

I've never before read a book told with this style, time-play, and wide change of perspective. It was very interesting and a good brain-stretch. Interestingly, as soon as I finished this book, I read You Remind Me Of Me (which I picked up from the library on a whim) and it also bounces around in it's time frames and perspectives in a somewhat similar way, although perhaps less skillfully.

It's a short book, and an interesting one, if you can get past the entire point of the whole story: Dead.