[In the following review, Kamine offers a positive assessment of The Gift of Stones.]

Jim Crace has written a short novel about growing up in a prehistoric village—a Stone Age Bildungsroman. This is less odd than it sounds given the settings of the stories in his first book, an award-winner in his native England, entitled Continent. Equal parts mock anthropology, V. S. Naipaul and Jorge Luis Borges, it pitted primitive societies against modern ones with good ironic effect.

The Gift of Stones drops the modern as well as most of the irony. While the contrast is missed, the author demonstrates that a vividly imagined, artfully rendered primitiveness is enough. The novel's hero is the village storyteller, its narrator his adoptive daughter (who has adopted him and his role.) She quotes from and paraphrases her father, and occasionally fills in what he misses or cautions the reader not to trust too completely in what he is saying.

Crace has been careful to keep this double narration from getting out of hand. We have ample opportunity to mull over questions of art versus life, fact versus fiction. More crucially, we are told a compelling tale of primitive life in a suitably hard and surprisingly poetic prose.

The villagers are stone knappers, their product stone tools—ax- and arrow-heads, knives, scrapers, wrist guards. There are mines, shops and a marketplace. “This is how it worked,” the narrator states early on. “There were two breeds existing side by side, the stoneys and the mongers, the villagers who dug and worked the flint, the traders who hawked and peddled it with the world beyond.”

They are industrious, prosperous, dull. The gift of stones has kept them free from harm: “If all the outside world needed was to pound and crush and hammer like savages then any rock would do. But once they wanted more, to pierce and slice, to cut and scrape, to remove the flesh from the inner side of pelts … then they … could not be free of us and we were safe.”

Not entirely safe, however. A marauding horseman wounds the father providing the villagers with a rare cause for excitement and disruption. They decide an arm must be amputated. Crace gives two versions of the operation, father's and daughter's. In fact the father has numerous versions of this and every other incident in his life, and he brings one or another forth depending on what he gauges will entertain his audience. His tales tend to the fantastical or the comic.

His daughter, on the other hand, wants more than entertainment from stories—she wants truth. It is an ongoing debate. The daughter warns: “Watch out. He's chopping and knapping at the truth. He's shaping to make a tale.” (Crace never reaches for his metaphors, instead drawing from what is already at hand—a good measure of his sureness.) Or she cuts him short: “We do not need to hear my father's other variations.” The father's typical response: “Why tell the truth when lies are more amusing, when lies can make the listener shake her head and laugh—and cough—and roll her eyes?”

The narrative moves forward between them, with the daughter ceding to the father only to check him, correct him, take over from him. Following a brief description of his childhood, the father recalls his discovery of his talent for storytelling.

He explains that one-armed, he became useless to the stoneys, so he was left to wander the village and its outskirts. One day, running along the shore after a distant ship, he happened upon a woman and her daughter (our narrator) who made their home on a heath, the woman trading herself for food and protection from the roving horsemen. He spent the night—his first away from the village—and when he returned he was asked where he had been. He begins to speak of the ship that led him astray:

This is my moment of betrayal, both of the woman and the truth. Hear how it comes to life. See my cousins, sitting there, their chins aglow with grease, their eyes on fire, their expectations high, their dreams and nightmares on display.

‘I caught the ship,’ I said. ‘It came ashore.’

The daughter, of course, doesn't believe it. No one becomes a storyteller in an instant. “The truth for what it's worth is this … and now I'm guessing, so can you see the value of my truth? … my father's talent for inflating and for telling lies was already there, from birth. But no one guessed its power—until, that is, my father transformed his defect into craft.”

The narrative tug-of-war is a seductive and mostly successful device, bringing an added tension to bear on events and keeping us attuned to the author's manipulations. At times, though, it causes confusion (the absence of quotation marks at the start of inter-narrated paragraphs does not help) and gives rise to a few small disappointments. The greatest of these involves the narrator herself. Two-thirds of the way through the book she declares, “I should show my face,” then inexplicably steps out again, and we do not get to know her the way we do her father.

Even so, Crace wisely never gives the impression he is taking sides. He works steadily through the incidents of the novel, shaping it as carefully as his stoneworkers do their knives, the uncomplicated rhythms and hard sounds of his sentences echoing the lives of his characters. Here is the father's description of the death of the narrator's mother:

I found her flat upon her back. Her head was on its side. The gulls had had her eyes. One leg was twisted, one arm was turned. Her hands were weighing down her smock. Her fingers were as straight and cold and blue as razor shells. At her side a dozen scallops lay, sticky with her blood. I could not see the wound until I knelt to straighten out her arm and leg. And then I saw the wound deep in the shallow waist-dell of her back. I saw the arrow, too. And pulled it out. And wiped it clean. And wondered at its weight and shape and shine.

The arrow is of bronze. It signals the end of safety for the village, the withdrawal of the gift. The market for stone tools dries up; the mongers leave. The narrator, her father and the stoneys must also leave or face hunger and horsemen armed with weapons of bronze. The father—sole wanderer among them—leads them to the limit of the world he has known, the heath where he discovered the narrator and her mother.

Novels about growing up traditionally end when the hero is about to head out into the world beyond. This one is no exception. “The stories he'd told were of our past,” the narrator says of her father. “His new task was to invent a future for us all.”