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“People are like stones. You strike them right, they open up like stones.” The Gift of Stones by Jim Crace is gorgeous in its austerity as one would expect a story set in the Stone Age to be. The language is noticeably limited, as one would expect the language of the Stoneys to have been. What Crace’s word choice lacks in variety, it accrues in sound. And the plot and the characters in Crace’s Stone Age world are profoundly relevant and profoundly relatable.

Crace’s economy within 170 pages is remarkable. The narrator is the daughter of a one-armed storyteller, and for the majority of the book she relays her father’s stories, adding her own observations and pointing out where she believed her father had embellished or outright lied with his tales. Their village is a two-tiered society divided between the stoneys, who break stones into tools, and the mongers, who trade the tools with farming villages or the nomadic horsemen. Her father was an outcast, neither a stoney nor a monger. An orphan, he was raised by an apathetic uncle. When still a boy, his arm was severed by an arrowhead and amputated. Without the dexterity to work, he wandered the coastline all day. He scouted out ships on the sea, met nomadic peoples camped nearby, found new rocks, and ate new foods that no one from his village had ever tasted. In the evenings when he returned to the village, he found his vocation: telling stories from his adventures on the coast.

Shaping stories is as much an art to him as cutting stones is to the knappers. One day he finds an arrowhead made of bronze along the coast. The bronze is a harbinger of a new age, and the stoneys soon find themselves out of business as their customers no longer are interested in tools made of stone. With their skills no longer valued and their world so insular that all they know of the “outside world” is what they have learned from the storyteller, the stoneys ask the one-armed outcast to be their leader. He takes them to the sea, making it up as he goes along as he always did when telling stories. Crace leaves us here, with the uncertainty of Willie Loman, wondering what will become of the stoneys’ obsolescence. We are more confident for the fate of the storyteller. He is used to improvising. But his people, who have been governed by ritual, are deeply afraid. They loathe to subject themselves to the extemporaneous. The feeling of going into the unknown at the end of the book, for me, was visceral. I know this feeling, and I believe everyone who has ever looked up at the brave new world to discover their behaviors or thoughts have become obsolete will find the themes of this prehistoric fiction jarring and powerful.

Crace is inventive with limited language. For example, nearly all whitish bodily fluids are called “pus.” He uses pus to describe seepages of trees and plants, to describe froth on the ocean, to describe semen, among other white, wet things. For bushes and plants he repeatedly uses the term “bracken,” or “brackish.” He uses “flint” to describe not only rocks, but rain, personality traits, and other non-rock items. “Pears” are not just fruit, they recur again and again as motif for opportunity and chance. “Geese” are luxury; they are fleeting dreams. I think he does this to demonstrate the inventiveness the stoneys had with limited substances. They used a few types of rock to make everything, their houses, their cooking utensils, their knives, their sewing equipment. With a few words, Crace fashions a world.

And the sounds that can erupt from simple words! Crace’s prose is noticeably musical. He uses alliteration and natural imagery in paragraph that in and of themselves could be poems (this is my personal favorite as a reader). Take this chapter opening paragraph of scatological poetry:

“The first thing that my father noticed was the stench. The saltland heath—sodden and yellowed by the winter—was sweating in the sun. It smelled like rotten fruit, like beer, like cow’s breath. The earth was passing wind; it belched at every footfall; its boil had burst; it was brackish and spongy with sap and pus and marsh.”

Do you hear the esses? Can you smell the sweaty, yellow stench? There’s “brackish” and “pus” again to describe a boggy, swampen heath. I love it. It seethes, it oozes. It is just as grotesque and humid as the description of his itching, infected and bothered arm stump. Earthy and primal.