Like a schoolboy chemist, Jim Crace is keen on stinks. Quarantine (1997) gave us “the devil's eggy dinner” on a dying man's breath, and his new book ferments the “pungent details of mortality,” until they make policemen cough and gag. Being Dead traces the decomposition of two middle-aged science teachers after they have been murdered on a beach, and in it Crace both indulges a talent for visceral nastiness and conducts a more tender commemorative post-mortem on their thirty-year relationship.

Doctors of zoology, Joseph and Celice are an idiosyncratic couple whose love has somewhat cooled, at least on Celice's side. Neither is attractive, physically or as a character. Joseph is a bore who wears a T-shirt blazoned with “Dolbear's formula (for estimating air temperature by the frequency of insect stridulations),” and he is known for his coldness at the Institute where he directs research. Celice is feistier, and likes to remind her students that natural science is concerned with “death and violence,” before banging a book shut for emphasis at her “practised, closing joke”: “I don't believe that any student's perished at my hands. Yet.” She finds Joseph irritating, but it wasn't always so. Although Joseph is well under average height, leading to his self-deprecating catchphrase “I'm far too short to—” (dance, flirt, or whatever), he has a surprisingly deep singing voice. This is what first attracted Celice to him, and on a coastal field trip he added to it by showing her his trick (“My only trick”). His research speciality, the sprayhopper, Pseudogryllicus pelagicus, will not jump when you blow on it, or even touch it, but if it is blown on wetly, it will jump at once.

It is this stretch of beach, the scene of his triumph with the sprayhopper, that Joseph wants them to revisit thirty years later. He hopes they might make love there, although Celice is less keen. Unfortunately, they are not alone on the sands. Their killer is there too, envying their middle-class existence just as he hates all “the rich, the old, the educated and the loved, the fed, the wordy and the well laced.” Celice dies quickly, her head smashed with a rock, but Joseph suffers. With vomit in his throat and a broken rib puncturing his gut, he is fully aware that there is worse to come, and come it does, with more blows to the head and a kick to the testicles. Later, he partially recovers consciousness, stretching out a hand to Celice's leg before dying.

As usual, Crace shows his skills as a fabulist and call-my-bluff counterfeiter. The book is set in an unnamed country, with its own regional dishes and odd fauna, and Crace takes as his epigraph a twelve-line poem by Sherwin Stephens, “The Biologist's Valediction to his Wife” from Offcuts. “Eternity awaits? Oh, sure! / It's Putrefaction and Manure / And unrelenting Rot, Rot, Rot, / As you regress, from Zoo. to Bot.” It is a plausible poem from a plausible poet. Only its extreme “fit” to the book might lead us to doubt its authenticity, along with the poet's name: an amalgam of Wallace Stevens and Sherwin Nuland, the author of How We Die.

Not the least of Crace's inventions is the nineteenth-century mourning ritual known as a quivering. Had Joseph and Celice died a hundred years earlier, they would have been laid out in their best clothes, and at midnight a procession of mourners, women first, would come and weep for them noisily, tapping on the floor-boards and perhaps even using quiver sticks, made of metal rods with clacking wooden rings. The mourners would recall the dead couple's lives, working backwards until the quivering ends at daybreak with their births. Being Dead, Crace tells us, is a sort of quivering.

On the beach, meanwhile, “the bodies were discovered straight away.” By a beetle, that is. Then come “swag flies” and crabs, and a gull. Crace goes into considerable detail for anti-humanist effect, as the couple discolour and blacken, while their hair and nails still grow. Celice's body makes “good pickings for glucose-hungry flies.” A gull lifts Joseph's underpants, “misled by what it took to be the smell of fish,” and flies pick at the “semen lacquer on his inner thigh.” Growing ranker and ranker, the loving couple attract progressively smaller and more primitive life forms, taking their place in the ecology of the beach. “Whatever philosophical claims we might make for ourselves,” Joseph once told a student, “humankind is only marginal. We hardly count in the natural orders of zoology. We'll not be missed.” When the last of mankind has perished, there will still be sprayhoppers.

Crace extracts a kind of post-humanist poetry from their decay, and the book as a whole is written with what sometimes seems to be an excessive finesse, as the writing is pushed into barely appropriate registers that can seem callous. The rock that breaks their heads is “an untender joint of veal, with gristle silica.” A girl who dies in a fire is “kippered and cremated.” Their poetic final legacy is: “A rectangle of faded grass and, where the bodies had decayed for their six days of grace, a crushed and formless smudge of almost white where time and night had robbed the lissom of its green.”

Being Dead is an ambitious work Crace's attempt to reconcile a manifestly indifferent universe with a personal memorialization or “quivering” is important, but its awkward mix of anti-humanism and implicit sentimentality doesn't quite gel. The claim that Joseph and Celice somehow “enjoy” “a loving and unconscious end, beyond experience” seems tenuous to say the least. Being Dead is not an entirely satisfying novel, and perhaps even a distasteful one. Neither the self-consciously fine writing nor the playful fabulation really complements the gravity of the theme; if anything, Crace's all too obvious virtuosity risks trivializing the sad and horrible events he describes.