Guardian Review

In an article about the controversial United States "death tax" - an estate inheritance tax - a political commentator pointed out that it was a misnomer: only 2% of Americans would pay the tax, while 100% of Americans die. The second part of that sentence sounded deeply shocking in a culture where death is widely regarded as a disgrace on a par with getting fired for underachieving. Nevertheless human beings, including Americans, continue to die with alarming frequency: about 6,350 every hour at the last estimate. All other considerations aside, that's an awful lot of solid waste to dispose of. What happens to the stuff? If you really want to know the many and varied answers to that question, this is the book for you. And no doubt many people will. Gunther von Hagens's "Bodyworlds" show is doing well globally, and many people must have wondered when Damien Hirst was going to stop carving mutton and move on to his own species (an art lover in Scotland has reportedly volunteered his services, so it may be only a question of time). Besides, since the scientists keep telling us that we are nothing but our bodies, there's an understandable interest in wanting to know more about the body's ultimate fate. Unsurprisingly, it turns out not to be pretty, whichever option you or your loved ones choose. Stiff contains the gruesome full monty on burial, incineration and all other forms of corpse disposal - including a Swedish environmentalist who has perfected a technique for freeze- drying her neighbours and recycling the shredded product as compost - but the real interest lies in the chapters concerned with the increasing number of people who voluntarily agree to donate their bodies for medical and research purposes. For a variety of reasons, most donors don't stipulate precisely which purposes they have in mind, but probably few imagine that they might end up lying out in the open air in a state of advanced decomposition so that criminal-forensics researchers can advance the state of that branch of science by noting at what stage maggots start eating the subcutaneous fat and the cadaver emits a fart as the intestinal gas produced by bacteria feeding on the enzyme- ravaged cells of the intestinal lining is expelled - the "bloat stage" - all preceding the final collapse and liquefaction. (Interestingly, the brain is one of the first organs to dissolve, being located conveniently close to four of the major apertures of the body, as well as being soft and easy for bacteria to digest. "It just pours out the ears and bubbles out the mouth.") Would you like a side order of something with that? Mary Roach has a ton of them, for example the medical school in Maryland where the heads of "decedents" (the preferred term) are chainsawed off to be set in roasting pans and used by trainee face-lift surgeons to hone their skills on. Warning: this chapter contains scenes that some readers may find disturbing; as does the one about recently deceased crash test dummies being beaten to a pulp to test the limits of human impact tolerance; or the one about the "crucifixion experiments", where corpses were nailed to crosses in an attempt to prove the authenticity of the Turin shroud. In fact, pretty much the whole book. Twelve years ago, Bill Buford arranged an introduction to the pathologist whom Ian McEwan consulted for the cut-up scenes in The Innocent, so that I could attend a double post-mortem and write about it for Granta. (The pathologist told me that McEwan had been offered the same opportunity, but had declined.) Maybe I'm just getting squeamish with age, but I found reading this book a lot more unsettling than that experience. Actually, I think it has something to do with the style. Roach writes for Salon and Wired, and it shows: excellent first-hand reportage and meticulous docu mentation, but also a mass of educational factoids gleaned from the internet and secondary sources, plus (worst of all) endless failed attempts to lighten things up a little with facetious humour of the Bryson variety. Few things are more depressing than death, but this is one. However, ploughing through these pages concentrates the mind wonderfully, not unlike the prospect of being hanged in a fortnight. In my case, it concentrated it on the explanatory gap that philosophers call the mind-brain problem. How can, say, my instant decision to become a temporary vegetarian after reading this book be nothing but the jangling of insensate neuron receptors in the stuff that will eventually end up pouring out of my ears and bubbling out of my mouth? Then again, how can it not be? Put another way, if we are in fact nothing but our bodies, how can we care so much what happens to them after death, or about anything else for that matter? And if we're not, then what on earth are we? Michael Dibdin's latest Aurelio Zen book, Medusa , is published by Faber in August. To order Stiff for pounds 12.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. I Caption: article-dead.1 Besides, since the scientists keep telling us that we are nothing but our bodies, there's an understandable interest in wanting to know more about the body's ultimate fate. Unsurprisingly, it turns out not to be pretty, whichever option you or your loved ones choose. Stiff contains the gruesome full monty on burial, incineration and all other forms of corpse disposal - including a Swedish environmentalist who has perfected a technique for freeze- drying her neighbours and recycling the shredded product as compost - but the real interest lies in the chapters concerned with the increasing number of people who voluntarily agree to donate their bodies for medical and research purposes. For a variety of reasons, most donors don't stipulate precisely which purposes they have in mind, but probably few imagine that they might end up lying out in the open air in a state of advanced decomposition so that criminal-forensics researchers can advance the state of that branch of science by noting at what stage maggots start eating the subcutaneous fat and the cadaver emits a fart as the intestinal gas produced by bacteria feeding on the enzyme- ravaged cells of the intestinal lining is expelled - the "bloat stage" - all preceding the final collapse and liquefaction. (Interestingly, the brain is one of the first organs to dissolve, being located conveniently close to four of the major apertures of the body, as well as being soft and easy for bacteria to digest. "It just pours out the ears and bubbles out the mouth.") - Michael Dibdin.