The Gift of Stones

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".

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.

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.

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!