A Prehistoric Tale
KAMINE, MARK
A Prehistoric Tale The Gift of Stones By Jim Crace Scribner's. 170pp. $16.95. Reviewed by Mark Kamine Short story writer; contributor, "Massachusetts Review, " "Story Quarterly" Jim...
...The narrative tug-of-war is a seductive and mostly successful device, bringing an added tension to bear on events and keeping us attuned to the author's manipulations...
...This one is no exception...
...He begins to speak of the ship that led him astray: "This is my moment of betrayal, both of the woman and the truth...
...The father's typical response: "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...
...The gulls had had her eyes...
...And wiped it clean...
...The Gift of Stones drops the modern as well as most of the irony...
...Or she cuts him short: "We do not need to hear my father's other variations...
...It is an ongoing debate...
...Crace never reaches for his metaphors, instead drawing from what is already at hand —a good measure of his sureness...
...The narrator, her father and the stoneys must also leave or face hunger and horsemen armed with weapons of bronze...
...We have ample opportunity to mull over questions of art versus life, fact versus fiction...
...The villagers are stone knappers, their product stone tools—ax- and arrowheads, knives, scrapers, wrist guards...
...The father—sole wanderer among them— leads them to the limit of the world he has known, the heath where he discovered the narrator and her mother...
...And pulled it out...
...He's shaping to make a tale...
...then they...
...They are industrious, prosperous, dull...
...The gift of stones has kept them free from harm: "If all the outside world needed was to pound and crush and hammer like savages then any rock would do...
...Crace has been careful to keep this double narration from getting out of hand...
...my father's talent for inflating and for telling lies was already there, from birth...
...At times, though, it causes confusion (the absence of quotation marks at the start of inter-narrated paragraphs does not help) and gives rise to a few small disappointments...
...The arrow is of bronze...
...Novels about growing up traditionally end when the hero is about to head out into the world beyond...
...More crucially, we are told a compelling tale of primitive life in a suitably hard and surprisingly poetic prose...
...And then I saw the wound deep in the shallow waist-dell of her back...
...He explains that one-armed, he became useless to the stoneys, so he was left to wander the village and its outskirts...
...Naipaul and Jorge Luis Borges, it pitted primitive societies against modern ones with good ironic effect...
...His tales tend to the fantastical or the comic...
...He spent the night—his first away from the village—and when he returned he was asked where he had been...
...contributor, "Massachusetts Review, " "Story Quarterly" Jim Crace has written a short novel about growing up in a prehistoric village —a Stone Age Bildungsroman...
...the mongers leave...
...This is less odd than it sounds given the settings of the stories in his first book, an awardwinner in his native England, entitled Continent...
...Even so, Crace wisely never gives the impression he is taking sides...
...and now I'm guessing, so can you see the value of my truth...
...There were two breeds existing side by side, the stoneys and the mongers, the villagers who dug and worked the flint, the traders who hawked and peddled it with the world beyond...
...They decide an arm must be amputated...
...Hear how it comes to life...
...While the contrast is missed, the author demonstrates that a vividly imagined, artfully rendered primitiveness is enough...
...A marauding horseman wounds the father providing the villagers with a rare cause for excitement and disruption...
...But once they wanted more, to pierce and slice, to cut and scrape, to remove the flesh from the inner side of pelts...
...Following a brief description of his childhood, the father recalls his discovery of his talent for storytelling...
...The greatest of these involves the narrator herself...
...The narrative moves forward between them, with the daughter ceding to the father only to check him, correct him, take over from him...
...Her fingers were as straight and cold and blue as razor shells...
...In fact the father has numerous versions of this and every other incident in his life, and he brings one or another forth depending on what he gauges will entertain his audience...
...He works steadily through the incidents of the novel, shaping it as carefully as his stoneworkers do their knives, the uncomplicated rhythms and hard sounds of his sentences echoing the lives of his characters...
...His new task was to invent a future for us all...
...The stories he'd told were of our past," the narrator says of her father...
...See my cousins, sitting there, their chins aglow with grease, their eyes on fire, their expectations high, their dreams and nightmares on display...
...No one becomes a storyteller in an instant...
...Not entirely safe, however...
...At her side a dozen scallops lay, sticky with her blood...
...Her hands were weighing down her smock...
...One leg was twisted, one arm was turned...
...could not be free of us and we were safe...
...But no one guessed its power—until, that is, my father transformed his defect into craft...
...It came ashore.'" The daughter, of course, doesn't believe it...
...Two-thirds of the way through the book she declares, "I should show my face," then inexplicably steps out again, and we do not get to know her the way we do her father...
...caught the ship,' I said...
...The novel's hero is the village storyteller, its narrator his adoptive daughter (who has adopted him and his role...
...She quotes from and paraphrases her father, and occasionally fills in what he misses or cautions the reader not to trust too completely in what he is saying...
...One day, running along the shore after a distant ship, he happened upon a woman and her daughter (our narrator) who made their home on a heath, the woman trading herself for food and protection from the roving horsemen...
...This is how it worked," the narrator states early on...
...Thedaughter warns: "Watch out...
...And wondered at its weight and shape and shine...
...The market for stone tools dries up...
...Crace gives two versions of the operation, father's and daughter's...
...There are mines, shops and a marketplace...
...It signals the end of safety for the village, the withdrawal of the gift...
...Here is the father's description of the death of the narrator's mother: "I found her flat upon her back...
...His daughter, on the other hand, wants more than entertainment from stories —she wants truth...
...Equal parts mock anthropology, V.S...
...He's chopping and knapping at the truth...
...The truth for what it's worth is this...
...Her head was on its side...
...I saw the arrow, too...
...I could not see the wound until I knelt to straighten out her arm and leg...
Vol. 72 • March 1989 • No. 6
