The Gift of Stones

The Gift of Stones is a 1988 novel by Jim Crace. It takes place in a late stone age British setting, just as metal tools are beginning to arrive. The novel was inspired by a stone age skeleton, missing an arm, which showed signs of the arm having been lost years before the subject died.

Plot
Set in and around a stoneknapper village, the village sustains itself due to the incomparable quality of the stone from its mine, and the craftsmanship of the tools its produces from it. Strangers and traders are compelled to follow the commands of the stoneknappers within the village and offer luxurious goods in trade. The village is thus able to maintain itself itself with only the single industry of stone tools. Its society is stratified between the workers, who mine and work the stone, and the merchants who sell the stone and are the public face of the village. The merchants accrue the wealth and rule the village, while the workers work long hours and sustain industrial disease from the dust created when mining and working the stone. Nevertheless, extremely skilled stoneworkers have a certain degree of prestige within and without the village.

The novel is presented as the story of a young woman, who calls herself the daughter of a storyteller. That man starts as an orphan mineworker in the village, provided for by his resentful merchant uncle. The boy dreams of being free and living as a wild horse rider, some of who come to the village for arrowheads. The boy tends to shirk his work, and while watching horse riders one day, he is shot in the arm with an arrow. He is brought back to the village, and his injury requires the amputation of his arm. A master stoneknapper makes a special blade to sever the arm, while one of the horse riders performs the cut.

Afterwards, the boy is unable to work in any capacity in the village. His uncle quickly becomes resentful of the boy's presence, and he begins wandering around outside the village. These trips prompt the two great themes of the boy's life: storytelling, and his love. The boy uses the things he sees outside the village, and his own imagination, to concoct wild stories that he tells the villagers, claiming that he actually experienced them. The boy, who had been useless to everyone, finds a purpose in entertaining them with his tales. As time goes on, he becomes better and better at doing so.

Early on after leaving the village, he meets a haggard woman living in a small hut with her very young daughter. Her husband and sons have disappeared after taking whale ivory to sell to the village, and she now survives by prostituting herself to passersby for food. Despite the woman's poverty and ugliness, the boy quickly falls in love with her, but she refuses to have sex with him. As time goes on, the boy continues to visit her, and has good and bad times with her, but she continually spurns him while prostituting herself.

Eventually, the boy convinces the woman to move into the stoneknappers' village and the villagers to allow her to enter, but her manner clashes with the ways of the villagers, she continues to refuse to have sex with the boy, and she continues to prostitute herself. Eventually, she is killed by an arrow, but the exact circumstances of her death are mysterious - the narrator relates several contradictory versions, including one where the boy is to blame. The village also goes into decline, as bronze metal has begun to circulate, brought from over the sea, and its superiority to stone has gutted the village's economy. As the village reaches a point of desperation, the boy takes charge, intending to lead the villagers to where the metal makers now live, so they can learn a new trade. Despite the fact that he has never been very far from the village, he has been farther than any who live there, and he is able to convince them that he can do so. The narration ends after the villagers leave their village behind, but the narrator reveals that the storytelling boy was in fact not her father, but that she was the young daughter of the woman he loved. Since she has grown to become a storyteller herself, it is likely that the boy was able to lead the villagers to a new life, and passed on his profession to his adopted daughter.