As it turns out, however, the novel was as much a trap for Mr. Schepisi as it was an opportunity. Though the book runs only about 300 pages, it is so densely packed with gracefully written insights into its characters, and their social and historical backgrounds, that even an ambitious adaptation and elaborate production like Mr. Schepisi's seems skimpy and unclear. Indeed, the movie provides an object lesson in what novels do best and what movies do best. Mr. Schepisi can be credited with remaining focused on the central configuration of the book: the serio-comic odyssey of four South London pub habitués charged with carrying out a fifth's last wishes–or as the title would have it, his last orders.

On a drive to Margate to spread their friend's ashes, there are memory flashbacks connected to the four friends, the deceased, and all the women and children in their lives. Here the iconic edge of movies over novels is realized with the felicitous casting of Tom Courtenay, David Hemmings, Bob Hoskins and Ray Winstone as the four pilgrims, Michael Caine as their late friend, and Helen Mirren as his unfaithful widow (though under the most movingly extenuating circumstances).

The male characters are not salaried workers or wage slaves, but lower-middle-class entrepreneurs whose wives seldom think of careers. Mr. Caine's Jack Dodd was a butcher because Dodd and Son had to stay in the family. Mr. Winstone's Vince, Jack's adopted son, rebelled against that tradition and opened a car dealership. Mr. Hoskins' Ray gave up the insurance business to become a successful bookie. Mr. Hemmings' Lenny was quickly disabused of his middleweight-championship aspirations and opened a fruit-and-vegetable stand as part of being a lifelong loser. Only Tom Courtenay's Vic keeps a level head throughout, with a stable marriage, two sons to carry on his undertaking business, and a professional calm all the way to the disposal of Jack's ashes at the seaside.

On the printed page, the characters do not immediately jump out at you as they do on the screen. In movies, actors collaborate with their characters to create an opaque barrier between the audience and the filmmaker; in novels, the characters are prose transparencies that never fail to reveal the author to the reader.

Unfortunately, Mr. Schepisi quickly loses his iconic advantage by having to resort to a second line of young actors to play the aged leads in flashbacks that go back almost half a century. We are distracted time and again by having to contemplate how little or how much they resemble the more familiar faces in the here and now. And particularly for American audiences, the rapid cockney dialect with which the actors sacrifice communication for realism is another problem. In his novel, Mr. Swift's dialogue is no less authentic, but readers can contemplate the context of his masterly adjoined sentences at their leisure. In the movie, there is too little time on the screen for Mr. Schepisi to plant his visual signposts en passant , as it were.

Mind you, I am not endorsing the current Harry Potter-Lord of the Rings mania for literal adaptations of books into movies for fanatical adolescent readers. Hence, I do not fault Mr. Schepisi for a certain degree of compression, even though it meant sacrificing one of my favorite characters, Mandy, Vince's wife, a surrogate daughter to Jack and Amy.

What Mr. Swift and Mr. Schepisi are ultimately saying is that every life, however ordinary it may seem on the surface, is important enough to be explored for its full complement of happiness and heartbreak, comedy and tragedy, luck and misfortune, all ending the same way–either in a grave or an urn. Strangely, Last Orders is the third movie I've seen recently– The Shipping News and Maelstrom are the others–in which an urn containing the ashes of the departed is hauled around from place to place. Is cremation the new order of the day, and does it signify a decline in traditional religious faith and the ascendancy of a universal environmentalism? Certainly, Mr. Swift goes much deeper into the metaphysical implications of his strange story than does Mr. Schepisi with his instinctively

humanistic bias, but that again reflects the aesthetic tendencies of two art forms and two media in collision with each other.

Kidman's Comic Flop

Jez (Jeremy) Butterworth's Birthday Girl , from a screenplay by Tom Butterworth and Jez Butterworth, falls flat despite its very talented cast and its satiric acuity with the minor characters.

Nicole Kidman is on hand with one of those strenuously athletic sensual performances to which we've become accustomed ever since she burst upon our consciousness in 1989 in Phillip Noyce's Dead Calm . Here she plays Nadia, a Russian Internet bride summoned by hapless bank clerk John (Ben Chaplin) to his home in the London suburbs of Aldenston. After John discovers, to his horror, that Nadia does not speak a word of English, they are compelled to communicate solely through a variety of kinky sexual acts for which both have a startling affinity.

When Nadia's two Russian "cousins" burst in upon the happy suburban sexfest, John gradually realizes that he's been targeted and victimized by a dangerous gang of touristy Russian extortionists with Nadia as their bait–and, of course, that Nadia actually can speak fairly fluent accented English. Another surprise is that she had previously been impregnated by her Russian lover Alexei (Matthieu Kassovitz), much to John's dismay and Alexei's as well.

Alexei's more practical sidekick, Yuri (Vincent Cassel), tries to keep a lid on all the complications while tricking John into robbing his own bank to save Nadia from an imaginary dire fate.

As I watched the film struggle with all its switches and turnabouts, I wondered why it wasn't funnier, more charming or more exciting. Much of the problem lies in the nebbishy passivity of John in the face of one deception and disaster after another. I began to suspect that the filmmakers were in over their heads and had a hell of a time figuring out how to spring John and Nadia for the mandatory happy ending prescribed for a giddy comedy caper movie.

Unfortunately, the film manages to dissipate its suspense without convincing us that the ending makes any sense. Ms. Kidman displays a very resourceful personality in Birthday Girl . Her range of expressions is impressive, and her very suggestive physical dexterity keeps one watching even when her motivation is clouded over by endlessly shifting moods. But, as the late, great clown Bobby Clark complained in a stage revival of Victor Herbert's Sweethearts , "Never was a thin plot so complicated."

The literary novelists from Britain best known in the United States can be classified by decibel level: the noisy (Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson), the somewhat less noisy (A.S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes) and the blessedly quiet (Graham Swift, Kazuo Ishiguro). On this same scale, Jim Crace–who lives in Birmingham, light years from the London scene–has been sub-audible: zero ego clamor, zero media buzz. And yet I'm willing to bet that the cool, crisp sound of his voice will begin to be heard very soon, and that the sound will carry far and linger a long time.

Being Dead , Mr. Crace's sixth novel, was just nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award. Will winning bring him the attention he richly deserves? He's won plenty of prizes in England and a ton of critical praise (in America, the reviews have been scattered but almost unanimously ecstatic)–and still he hasn't broken out. (The NBCC award will probably go to the crowd-pleasing American favorite, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay , or to White Teeth by Zadie Smith, which is the sexy choice: The author is young, talented and photogenic, and the book, raucously multiculti, was thought to be a serious contender for England's Booker Prize but was left off the short list. Ms. Smith is owed.) An American award for Mr. Crace would be nice, but hardly necessary. He's a captivating storyteller and alarmingly intelligent; more importantly, his novels seem blessed with wisdom. In short, there's no hurry: Mr. Crace will sooner or later be crowned with honors.

His debut was Continent (1986), linked stories about an invented land mass and the socio-economic growing pains of its population. Next came The Gift of Stones (1988), a love story set in a Stone Age village in the split second before bronze made stone weaponry obsolete. Arcadia (1992) was set sometime right around now in a city called Gotham; it should be on the bookshelf of every urban planner. Mr. Crace went nautical in Signals of Distress (1994), and for the first time fixed his action in a specific time and place: a seaport on the English coast in 1836. Three years ago he published Quarantine , a shockingly vivid and convincing re-imagining of Jesus' 40-day sojourn in the wilderness. And last but nowhere near least: Being Dead , to my taste easily the best novel of the year 2000.

Can you imagine a funny novel about two corpses lying in the dunes for six days–a comedy of bodily decomposition? Or, stranger still, a rotting-corpse comedy that egins with a brutal double murder, encompasses a 30-year love story and addresses, with utmost seriousness, what we know of the hereafter? Being Dead is at once macabre and lighthearted, violent and tender, witty and profound, irreverent and moving–and perfectly calibrated, so that all these crosscurrents seem to ebb and flow in harmony.

Two middle-aged zoologists, Joseph and Celice, decide to picnic in the dunes at Baritone Bay, the place where they had met 30 years earlier when they were students doing field research. The picnic is Joseph's idea, a bit of romantic nostalgia peppered with lust. His erotic hopes are nearly fulfilled, then fatally interrupted: He is naked, Celice half-undressed when they are attacked by a robber who batters them to death with a hunk of granite and steals their wedding bands, their watches, her bracelet, some cash, the keys to the car.

The rest of the novel is a playful narrative exploration of time, mortality's smoldering fuse. Three clocks are ticking. One is a kind of necrometer: It runs forward from the instant of death to the discovery of the bodies by police dogs six days later; it charts decay and the necrophagous activity of beetles, birds, crabs and rodents; and it monitors, also, the half-hearted search conducted by the dead couple's disaffected daughter. A second clock measures the day of the murder: Mr. Crace sets it back earlier and earlier, until at last it reads 6:10 a.m. and the couple is still safe in bed, still asleep as the morning breaks–"A dawning death." The third clock is antique by contrast: It takes us back 30 years, to the clumsy courtship that led to the marriage of Joseph and Celice. As these three clocks tick, we become uncomfortably aware of time's terminal consequence for each of us. Though every clock can seem like a spinning roulette wheel, bringing us absurd coincidence and unlikely accident (two people meeting at the seashore and falling in love, the same two people planning a picnic at the same seashore and dying violently)–in the end, the game is drearily predictable: Everybody dies.

What happens to the remains when human life is extinguished? It's sort of slapstick. Chapter 6 begins like so: "The bodies were discovered straight away. A beetle first." A day later, the ugly biological facts are taking on bold hues: "The skin was piebald. Pallid on the upper parts. Livid on the undersides … Celice, her nose still pressed against the grass, was purple-faced. Her downward-flexing knees and upper thighs were black as grapes. Her buttocks were as colourless as lard."

It could be argued that Mr. Crace has merely elaborated beautifully on the great lines from King Lear : "Men must endure / Their going hence, even as their coming hither: / Ripeness is all." As he tells us, "Celice and Joseph were soft fruit. They lived in tender bodies. They were vulnerable. They did not have the power not to die. They were, we are, all flesh, and then we are all meat." Toward the end of the novel, he shares with us the thoughts of the disaffected daughter: "No one transcends. There is no future and no past. There is no remedy for death–or birth–except to hug the spaces in between. Live loud. Live wide. Live tall."

This is not the sum total of Mr. Crace's message. He's just as interested, I'd say, in living narrow but deep, with memory and imagination coursing through the channel. No one transcends. And yet, with loving attention to two putrefying corpses, Mr. Crace succeeds in granting Joseph and Celice a kind of immortality. There's no afterlife, at least not as advertised from the pulpit on Sunday mornings, but this fictional couple lives in death.

Adam Begley is the books editor of The Observer.