The Beginning of Stories

by

Paul Clark

Occasionally a writer comes along who doesn’t fit into any particular category. He doesn’t write in a particular genre; the topics of his books surprise each time out; he doesn’t seem to fit into any particular literary group—he just produces compelling fiction.

Jim Crace is one of those authors. Over the last two decades he has had a string of novels that were different as can be from one another in plot, characterization, and length. He has written a novel as a linked series of short stories, Continent; a thriller about late 20th century commerce, Arcadia; a novel about a 19th English fishing village, Signals of Distress; a re-imagining of the story of Jesus’ 40 days and nights in the desert, Quarantine; and a novel where his protagonists are dead for most of the novel, Being Dead.

My favorite of his books remains a selection of very short stories all having something to do with food, The Devil’s Larder, and a post-apocalyptic tale set in the Eastern United States, The Pesthouse.

Crace plays with the conventions of the novel in many ways. For instance, all of his novels include epigraphs, short pieces of prose before the novels begin which thematically tie into the subject of the book. The epigraphs have gravitas often from some scholarly-sounding tome. Invariably, they are also made up—quote, author and book—by Crace. He also likes to make up words, especially relating to the natural world, that sound perfectly plausible in the context of his books, but are nowhere to be found in any reference book.

My favorite of all his novels is The Gift of Stones. It is set in a prehistoric village where the villagers mine stone and turn it into flints that can be used as arrowheads and knives, and trade with other merchants for food and other simple manufactured goods. Early in the story, a young boy taunts some visitors, men on horseback, one of whom wounds the boy with a poisoned arrow through the elbow. The boy’s lower arm must be severed, leaving him useless for stone work, but freeing him to explore the world outside the village, a world the more industrious villagers never care to visit because they are too busy working.

So the boy leaves the village but always comes back—with stories, stories that the villagers tolerate and sometimes even enjoy. But stories are not flints, and flints are all that it important in this village.

The novel is told from the perspective of the boy and also a young girl who comes to know him as father. The Gift of Stones, featuring a village and a people made up out of whole cloth by Crace, is simply a tale of how humans learned how to tell and listen to stories.

At one point the girl, reflecting back to the time before the village is changed forever, says, “My father’s ornateness as a story-teller cannot obscure the one plain truth . . . that the village was obsessed with work, with industry, with craft. It made the people purposeful, wealthy, and strong. It made them weary, too, and a little jealous of the outside world beyond the hill, beyond the warren of mine-shafts, its drifts of unworked flint.”

The boy soon learns that a story is not a simple retelling of events. “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? People are like stones. You strike them right, they open up like shells.” Later, in trying to tell the tale of a woman he found, a woman with a missing husband and two missing sons, nursing a young girl, he finds the truth wanting again.

“I knew at once the truth could not be told to them. It was too dull and disappointing. No love, poor food, a woman – thin and naked, with breasts like barnacles – who sold herself for chickens. What could I say to make it sound attractive? They wanted something crafted and well turned. I wanted their applause. The truth would never do. It was too fragile and too glum. It offered no escape.”

The boy learns that, just as the villagers take mere stone and turn it into something that travelers will want to barter with other things of value, he had to take mere events and turn them into something glorious and memorable, something that create joy, fear, awe. He transforms his defect—a one armed-boy can not mine or turn stone into flint—into craft. He never told the same story the same way twice.

I’ve read this book a few times now. It should be a basic text for any fiction writing class because within the tall tales the boy tells of the world beyond the village, lie basic truths of storytelling. Crace writes, “The power of the tale is in the gaps and pauses.”

In the end, the life of the village is uprooted by something so basic in the history of mankind—progress. The value of the only work that the villagers know is replaced by something more valuable, and the villagers find themselves following the boy, now a young man, out of the village, to the lands that fueled the man’s stories for so many years. But life outside the village changes the value of his stories: “The stories that he’d told were now our past. His new task was to invent a future for us all.” A tall task for any writer—in the Stone Age or the present.


Paul Clark is a writer in suburban Chicago. By day he edits a variety of print and online business and legal publications. By night, he writes for pleasure. Over the last several months, he has re-read some of his favorite books and written a series of essays about why these books remain important to him, even decades after the first read them. Contact Paul.