This May the wild rhododendrons are fairly shouting in pink explosions throughout the forests -- pygmy, Jackson, Montgomery and elsewhere. The Mendocino naturalist Jacques Helfer once called these shrubs "the laughter of Spring."

While watching these immodest flowers burst I've been reading Jim Crace's powerful new novel, Being Dead (Farrar, $21 hardcover). The story involves the death and lives of two scientists. At the start of the book they rest undiscovered in the dunes of a lonely English beach, victims of an unprovoked and anonymous mugging.

How old is an old rhododendron? The leggy shrubs in my particular acre could very well be hundreds of years old. Left to prosper in cut-over forests, ignored by loggers and house contractors, they can grow to small tree height, always reaching for the light.

As I read through Crace's short book I contemplated the flowers of May outside my window. The pink blooms drifting silently to the forest floor fell in musical counterpoint to Crace's poignant words.

Some years ago I happily discovered Jim Crace's quiet masterpiece, Signals of Distress. In 1997 his novel about Jesus, Quarantine, won the Whitbread Novel of the Year award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Being Dead is graphic, even repugnant in places. Ultimately, I found this difficult book uplifting. Crace touches on the larger world of academia and disaffected siblings, and drills down into the homeliest details of love and death. He finds beauty where others might turn away.

The story moves back and forth in time from the week these two middle-aged scientists are killed in the dunes, and the week, thirty years earlier, when they met and made love on the same beach. Like an ancient vine, Crace's tale sinuously twines around these two unlikely victims, Joseph and Celice, and the other people involved in their lives.

In the days between death and eventual discovery, we meet their daughter, who rushes reluctantly to their home, quitting her waitressing job and cutting short her personal rebellion.

"Her concern was not yet for her parents' welfare. It was mainly for herself, her hard-fought liberty. Breaking free to live a life without accomplishments so far away from them had not been easily achieved. She didn't want to be tugged back into their rigid, clerkish lives, that too-close ocean smell..."

There was a time when bodies lay at home and mourners held a "quivering" over them. "The greater the racket the deeper the grief," Crace writes. "A hundred years ago no one was silent or tongue-tied, as we are now, when death was in the room. They had not yet muzzled grief or banished it from daily life. Death was cultivated, watered like a plant."

Crace can't avoid a mordant sense of modern irony. Describing how the old lovers felt on returning to their beach, finding their old path had become a newly cleared road for construction vehicles, he writes, "... they came out of the trees into a harsh and blinding sky, too tall and blue and punitive, above a shocking corridor of clearances. Construction had begun... Celice did not regard the clearance as a metaphor, a thick and earthy line between their futures and their pasts. She merely was depressed by what they'd found..."

The writing throughout is exquisite: "Should we expect their spirits to depart, some hellish cart and its pale horse to come and take their falling souls away to its hot mines, some godly, decorated messenger, too simple-minded for its golden wings, to fly them to repose, reunion, eternity?

"...the plain and unforgiving facts were these: Celice and Joseph were soft fruit. They lived in tender bodies. They were vulnerable. They did not have the power not to die. They were, we are, all flesh, and then we are all meat."

Being Dead is a startlingly good book. As the New York Times reviewer wrote, "It's not clear to me why Jim Crace isn't world famous."

Aired Friday May 12, 2000 at 8:35 am and Sunday May 14, 2000 at 6:55 pm