Customer Reviews

Gift Of Stones

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I was unfamiliar with Crace before reading this muted narrative in the voice of one who survives awful and awesome economic hardship, wrought by technological change. I intend to make more of his acquaintance.

The setting is pre-Roman Britain in a community prospering because of its unsurpassed working of flint. The story centers on a man who loses a limb as a child and must survive on the contemptible outside of his people's working world . He becomes a superb story-teller using skills of an unrivalled social observer and even what today would be called a "futurist". He carefully watches and records, through semi-fictional stories, all the subtle as well as obvious forces inexorably gathering to undercut his people's world. For this is the dawn of the Bronze Age when that material would far outperform the best of the stonemasons' product. And so their world falls apart. But, using the skills he has had to hone because of being a misfit for so long, he finds a way to survive. This, we are left feeling, may be the sole legacy that transcends the vagaries of economic change. For those who can tell good (not necessarily true) stories of the past are sometimes the only ones whose understanding is enough to tell a story in the future tense, to, in essence, invent the future.

No one can say what that world was really like back then and thereby comment on how validly Crace depicts this long gone era. Yet I felt transported and that the sense of those unrecorded times was powerfully captured. Validity, who knows? Propinquity? For sure. Crace has built so very different a world yet one, which we feel familiar with, indeed, even at home in.

I would commend this fine book to anyone but especially those who believe that ours is an age of never-before experienced turbulence and uncertainty. Just as Barbara Tuchman did in "A Distant Mirror" but this time using fiction, Jim Crace disabuses us of the presumptuous idea that we bear heavier crosses than our long passed ancestors. Economic transition is never easy and this is an absorbing account of how it feels from the inside.

"The Gift Of Stones", is the second novel written by Jim Crace. He tells this story through a storyteller he created from the notes of Sir Henry Penn Butler in, "Memoirs of an Excavationist circa 1927". Evidently while pursuing old stone implements they came upon the bones from a lower arm of a child. Mr. Crace has done as they did the evening of their find when they sat around their fire and spun tales of why the bones were there, and where the balance of the bones were to be found. Mr. Crace took the same bit of information and created a remarkable work that is about change. The change is this book is not unlike the changes faced today. A fundamental shift in knowledge can have dramatic and even catastrophic effects on a people. And this is the tale of, The Gift Of Stones".

At some point most have read about the implements of The Stone Age, and also the dramatic changes that were brought about by the advent of bronze. Many have perhaps learned of this change through textbooks and classes in history. Jim Crace has told the same story of change as it might have been seen through the eyes of those who were dependent upon stone for their way of life. From the mention of the bones from a child's lower arm, he recreates history as he creates a wonderful novel.

The community of stoneworkers is recreated with marvelous detail about the methods used in creating stone implements. The descriptions go far beyond the crude instruments hacked from the blows of another stone. The author illustrates the artisans these people were with a stoneworker nicknamed, "the Leaf". Here was an artisan who would keep on his workbench a leaf as produced by nature, and use it both as inspiration and an item of beauty he would seek to emulate in his work. The craftsmen in this book are treated more like skilled sculptors/artists, than the makers of crude tools.

The author creates a circle with the flight of an arrow creating the basis for his story, and yet another arrow that brings everything to an end. The second arrow is of course fashioned from bronze, and it is an arrow that can kill much more than an animal or a man. It brings complete destruction to a way of life, to what is also referred to as an age. As he has done before Jim Crace is able to take a subject that is not unfamiliar, and recast the ideas to create a read that is new and unique.

This short novel ruminates on a number of very interesting themes in an unusual way. It is a book about the nature of stories, the nature of people, and the ways that we think about ancient peoples. Most of all, though, it makes the reader think about how change affects individuals and groups ... all through the story of a young man and his daughter.

If a book about the stone age conjures images of The Clan of the Cave Bear for you, then wipe it from your mind before starting this. The Gift of Stones starts from a simple premise: an archaeologist has found the amputated arm bone of a young boy, and he and his colleagues imagine what must have been his life. This young man also imagines lives, and tells those stories, much to the delight of his village. His daughter carries on the tradition as the true narrative voice of the book.

I had never read any of Crace's work before this slim volume, but I've already gone out to buy all of them. He is a wonderful writer without over-writing or involving himself in senseless wordplay. If you are looking for a thought-provoking story with memorable characters, then this book is definitely for you.

Jim Crace's novel of the coming of the Bronze Age to a small village somewhere in Europe (I'm guessing) is an engrossing, entertaining read. The village of his story makes its living by stone -- its inhabitants all either work it or trade the results to others. They know little of the outside world, and feel little curiosity about it. The story centers around a youth who loses part of an arm after being shot with an arrow -- his new handicap makes him useless to his family and neighbors, since he can no longer work. He begins to spend more and more time wandering further and further afield. When he brings back stories of what he has seen -- embellishing it more, and with greater skill, as time goes by -- he begins to see his narrative skill as a way to make himself valuable once again. The villagers gather around him at night, greedily drinking in his words.

During on of his expeditions, he comes across a woman living in a hut on a heath -- she is a widow, caring for an infant girl, scavenging what she can from her surroundings, selling herself to whoever will have her to earn food and clothing. The boy befriends her and the child -- on repeated visits, he comes to view them as a second family. During once such visit, her home is destroyed by farmers who dwell nearby, and she is left with nothing. The boy takes her and the child back to his village to live with him -- and her presence there stirs up a great deal of suspicion and jealousy, making life much more difficult than the boy had envisioned.

Crace's tale is crafted skillfully -- his prose invokes the period in a very believable way. The concerns, outlooks and beliefs of his characters speak more than their conversations could possibly convey about the life they lived, about the difficulties of their time. When events transpire to bring them knowledge that things are changing in the world around them -- the advent of bronze -- they are at first scornful, then struck cold with fear. They know the world as they know it is coming to an end.

Told alternately as a story around a fire by the boy as an adult, and by his daughter remembering what things were like when she was a child, this is a novel that is easy to read in one sitting -- it's that involving and compelling. This is an enlightening tale as well as an entertaining one -- and a book I will not soon forget.

Crace's pedagogic concern with capitalism shows through the surface of his dazzling prose. His exquisite writing cannot hide his all-too-overt interest in illustrating the effect of change on lives ruled by commerce. However, his other concern here, the ways in which stories are needed and created, springs to life. He manipulates, quite openly, the credulity of the readers with expert precision and good humor. Also woven into this already overflowing canvas are several examinations of love, all of which are unnerving. An unfinished, and yet quite moving novel. As much as its seams may show, you will not want to stop reading.

Set in a stone-age European village, the protagonist, who goes through the story unnamed, is handicapped in a childhood incident and that changes the direction of his life. He is unable to participate in the village's main industry, mining stones and making the finest weapons and tools from them. He ends up befriending a woman and child outside the village and eventually the three of them return to the village. The story focuses on change, how that youngster's disabling incident changes his life on a personal level, but every bit as much, how the changes of the world come to affect the village and its main industry. The village is a conservative, hard-working place, but the boy's inability to participate leads him to develop skills he would not have otherwise, most notably, storytelling. A fine story on the surface, the deeper levels flow well, how one's life events affect one's life and how external events can affect local ones, as well as considering in what ways that stone-age village parallels many things happening nowadays. A good yarn, but just as much, this provides many reasons to ruminate thoughtfully on the characters and events and on life's journey and its influences. I am glad I read it. You will be glad, too, when you do.

This sculpted story positively radiates through its simple but shapely prose. A village of stoneworkers labors smugly as their way of life begins to crumble from the intrusion of the Bronze Age. One among them sees and tells the truth, a man who lacks one lower arm. Unable to work stone, he takes on the craft of storytelling and feeds it with wanderlust. His tales create laughter but also foreboding in the villagers, who, like us, are made to confront love and work and "the slavery of skill".

I shot through this book in a few hours but enjoyed it all the same. It is full of Jim Crace's trademark slightly erotic descriptions of otherwise banal objects. I enjoy his ability to describe a situation or scene that would normally be offputting in a manner that renders it strangely alluring. The story itself is relatively simple, a young boy coming of age, but told in this unique backdrop, it stands out from similar tales in its detail and mood.

Mr. Crace has an uncanny ability to dipict society before time was recored. His grasp of primative culture is astounding. The story is both moving and terrifing. He intergrates economic disaster with delicate and believable characters. The simple everyday life of a primative village and its dramatic existance is fullfilling and insightful. I can't image how he reseached such fantastic nuances. The narrative is spontaneous and unpredictable. Although the subject matter may seem intimidating at first, the reader actually finds himself a part of the pre-bronze age.

This is a virtuoso performance by a gifted storyteller. Crace tells a moving tale of a deformed stone-age misfit through the eyes of a girl with a neolithic vocabulary. A wonderful read!