Narrated much in the same way as the movie Memento, Being Dead starts off with the murder of its protagonists. We then flash back in time to the point where they met and work our way forward to their murder. Underneath the unusual narrative device lies what is essentially a love story about two people who grew apart in life, but end up together in death. The odd part of the story is the clinical and scientific way the author describes death. There is very little sentimentality connected to it, just rotting flesh, shattered bone and decay. This makes a lot of sense out in the context of the lives of our main characters, as they are zoologists. This is the way they would talk about death, about the fly larva infesting their bodies, and the crabs feeding off their flesh (they were killed on a beach). While the gruesome details of their moldering bodies seems horrifying to most, this cycle of life would be beautiful to the scientist. So, basically, in death they are connected by the one thing in life that they both shared–science.
7
