tamaranth | Life on the Ceiling, life on the beach

Oh joy! I have a hospital appointment! And because this is counted as 'moderately disabling', it's quite soon, in NHS terms: February. bastards

Meanwhile, after a discussion with my doctor about the significance of the phrase 'moderately disabling', I have some new painkillers. I am floating gently around the ceiling, quite unable to do very much except lie around reading. Rational thought is beyond me as we can see. Suspect I shall be back at the doctor's surgery soon, asking for something slightly less, well, debilitating. ...

I also finished reading Being Dead, by Jim Crace. Maybe because of the painkillers, I am immensely taken by the way he uses language:

Her gene suppliers had closed shop. Their daughter was the next in line. She could not duck out of the queue. So she should not waste her time in this black universe. The world's small, breathing denizens, its quaking congregations and its stargazers, were fools to sacrifice the flaring briefness of their lives in hopes of paradise or fears of hell. No one transcends. There is no future and no past. There is no remedy for death - or birth - except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall. [p.171]

The story is simple: a middle-aged married couple (Joseph and Celice) who are marine biologists. They are victims of a random killer (on page 1). The rest of the book tells the story of their truncated lives, and the story of their daughter as she discovers their fate. Cheery stuff.

But it's wonderfully clear and unsentimental. This is a biologist's life-after-death, in the precise, detailed descriptions of the shore-life which overruns the bodies, in the nature of decay, in the way that what is left is only deeds.

The prose is crystalline and assigns as much emotional weight to seaweed and sand-skippers as to the suicide of Celice's colleague - which is described in glorious iambic pentameter
His suicide had saved him from old age. He'd stopped the stitches fraying in his life. He had departed from this earth intact, before his final fevers came and the lingering was over, the last weekend of snow or sun, the thinning blood, the trembling touch of strangers pulling down his lids. He'd died with all his futures still in place. His will. His might. His could. There were still concert tickets on his mantelshelf... The Mentor's suicide, she could persuade herself, was neo-Darwinist. [p. 63].

Crace doesn't glorify their deaths: he doesn't promise salvation to them or to their insufficiently-grieving daughter: he simply describes their lives, their deaths, their subsequent decay. There's another story buried in there, of a death when they were students, and I wonder how the balance will shift in my head as I assimilate the interwoven plots ...

Hmm. Am missing the Mekons (combination of medication, loss of nerve and poverty). Back to bed with a good book, and never let it be said I don't know how to have a good time.