[In the following review, Pei offers a negative assessment of The Gift of Stones.]

The world of this book is even more marginal than that of Continent; it is a prehistoric village of stone-workers who find themselves, at book's end, made superfluous by the coming of bronze tools. The novel's unnamed protagonist is a man who cannot work stone because he has lost an arm and instead becomes a storyteller, the entertainer of penurious “stoneys” that instinctively mistrust the imagination. The narrator is his daughter—not by blood but by virtue of the protagonist's long and generally bitter association with her mother, Doe, who lives mainly by bartering sex for food. The protagonist is already a “stew of idleness and insolence.” As a boy he loses his arm to a raiding horseman's poisoned arrow and is thrust into a lifetime as the village's maverick and outsider. By wandering a few hours from the settlement (where he encounters Doe), he becomes more of an explorer than anyone around him. His embroidered tales of ships landing with cargoes of perfume, and of a crew of “girls with one thing on their minds” become the villagers' entertainment; once they have accepted his stories as part of their lives, they lose interest when he begins to tell the truth. In the end, forced to abandon their village because they can no longer live by trading stone tools, the stoneys leave it to the protagonist “to invent or find a route for them,” unaware that his knowledge of the world scarcely exceeds their own.

The protagonist's tale of his life, woven together with his daughter's version and the “bespoke stories he told to tease and stimulate,” gives rise to reflections on storytelling itself, which we are clearly invited to apply to our own reading. The daughter's essay on fiction (and on her father) is essentially this: “We do love lies. The truth is dull and half-asleep. But lies are nimble, spirited, alive. And lying is a craft.” If someone were to tell simply the truth, “It would be flat … he'd have [his audience] witness all the tedium of work, each word of his would be a hammer blow.” Therefore, “Salute the liars—they can make the real world disappear and a fresh world take its place.” In counterpoint to her view, her storytelling (i.e., lying) father comes to the point of wanting to tell “a story made by life … true in every way,” but finds that the villagers, no longer entertained but threatened, don't want to hear it.

The Gift of Stones does invent a world that takes the place of our own; but the world it chooses to invent, rather than being “fresh,” is consistently, aggressively sour. “‘The secret of the storyteller,’ father said, ‘is Never Smile.’” Jim Crace has taken this advice to heart. An excerpt from the opening paragraph captures the novel's imagery and its tone:

The indented scar [on the stump of his arm] was like those made in the ice by boys with stones—a small uneven puncture, wet with brackish pus … As he grew older it would seem (he said) that his wasted and unsummoned semen had found less rewarding outlets from his body than he would have wished. He picked it rolled and spongy from the corners of his eyes after sleep. It gathered on his tongue and stretched into stringy tresses when he laughed or spoke.

Crace is as stingy as the traders of stone he writes about; he gives us a choice between the protagonist's lies about ships sailed by seductresses and the author's truth, a world in which “The earth was passing wind; it belched at every footfall; its boil had burst; it was brackish and spongy with sap and pus and marsh.” The seashore, in Crace's world, is “where the water runs to phlegm.” Man is the measure of all things here, remarkable mainly for his wretchedness. “What is liberty anyway? Not much more than self-deceit, a fantasy.”

At the end of The Gift of Stones, the protagonist finds himself without either lies or truth that can help the villagers on their way as they venture out into the world. To say the same for Jim Crace's relationship with his readers would actually be generous; in fact, he uses his liberty as an artist to impose on us a gratuitous burden. The novel is exactly what its title implies.