Vigor Mortis: The End of the Death Taboo
Kate Berridge
320pp, Profile, £17.99
If the Spirit Moves You: Life and Love after Death
Justine Picardie
208pp, Macmillan, £15.99
The Angel of Death is abroad throughout the land: you can hear the tapping of his word processor. This decade may be remembered as the time when we all woke up to mortality, and a literature of death sprang up to keep us alert. Easily within living memory, it was possible to grow to adulthood without seeing a naked adult or a simulation of sex, as if human reproduction did not exist. It is still possible to grow up never having seen a dead body, but it was not ever thus. The pendulum is set to swing back, suggests Kate Berridge in Vigor Mortis, which reminds us that until 1868 we could witness a live death show - a public hanging - just as today live sex shows are on offer in Soho clubs.
Berridge wants to demystify death, to the point of describing the gloopy residue of surgically enhanced breasts on the crematorium furnace floor. She reminds us of the inclusiveness of death in the Victorian period, when even little children were welcome. There were books of "juvenile obituaries", and children's literature included tips on taxidermy, poems about graveyards and articles on funerary rites in faraway places. There were improving stories on the imminence of death such as "The Sabbath Breaker Drowned" and "The Awful Death of a Giddy Young Man". Here's some New Year cheer from the 1824 Child's Companion: "You may not live to see the end of the year just begun. How many little graves you see in the churchyard..."
The first world war saw a literary displacement of death from people to animals, as if too much human mortality cannot be borne. In a gas attack described in the Boy's Own Paper in 1916, "Many kinds of wild birds are greatly excited and the usually unruffled owl becomes, as it were, half-demented. Only the sparrow seems to disregard the poisonous vapour and sparrows chirp on where horses are asphyxiated..." Nature notes for the apocalypse.
Berridge maintains that the first world war marked the watershed between the Victorian acceptance of death and 20th-century denial. In a way the war killed off mourning: by 1916, the sheer numbers of those eligible for mourning dress would have devastated national morale. There was therefore a retreat from full garb to a black armband, and later a parallel compression of a lengthy period of mourning into two minutes' silence. Gone were the funeral tea service, the black-edged notepaper, the mourning jewellery with dismal designs woven from the hair of the deceased. This phasing out of mourning turned death from a social experience with a common code into a private, antisocial experience to be coped with alone.
Others have explored this retreat from death in the face of 20th-century horrors. Last year Catherine Merridale brought out a mortography of the Soviet Union, Night of Stone (Granta), exploring the hidden grief of generations of Russians. The scale of Russian suffering in wars, famines and repression gave them an experience which was not unique, but extreme: there is, for example, a different Russian word for killing and eating a person than for eating the flesh of a cadaver. If the Russians were in denial, they had a lot to deny.
Berridge shows how the 19th-century fear for the corpse (that it might be dug up for use by anatomy classes, or the remains be damaged by later burials) was replaced by fear of the corpse - a dead body is a staple of horror films. Our fear of physical deterioration led to the 20th-century passion for embalming: draining the body of blood and filling it with preservatives to give it "death appeal" and stop it smelling until people no longer have to encounter it.
Another mortographer, the poet-undertaker Thomas Lynch, has a different view of the practice. In The Undertaking (Jonathan Cape) he tells of a colleague who laboured for a day and a night to piece together parts of the cranium of a girl who had been murdered with a baseball bat. The undertaker's objective was to allow the girl's mother to see her daughter again. "She was dead, to be sure, and damaged, but the face was hers again, not the madman's version... it is easier to grieve the loss that we see than the one we imagine or read about in the papers or hear of on the evening news, it was what we undertakers call a good funeral."
Berridge dates the increased public acceptance of death from the death of Princess Diana in 1997: a return to public mourning with the sea of flowers wrapped in Cellophane, condolence books in supermarket shrines, Diana dolls, Diana candles and even memorial margarine. "The sound of keening in Kensington was the sound of a nation doing death differently," she remarks. "For 80 years after the first world war we tried to live as if death didn't exist, but when Diana died there was no place to hide."
Vigor Mortis glitters with ideas and insights that offset its lack of intellectual astringency. Unfortunately, the quality of much of the writing does not excite. Many sentences are written at speed, with the imminence of a journalistic deadline too obviously hovering: the repetition of phrases weakens an otherwise powerful narration and sometimes commonplace facts are simply wrong.
While Vigor Mortis aims to put the fun back into funerals, If the Spirit Moves You conveys the bewilderment, loneliness and sheer rage of bereavement. Ruth Picardie famously wrote a magazine column about the process of dying from breast cancer; now her sister, Justine, has written a painfully personal book about how she has sought to contact Ruth, "whose name is carved upon my bones, whose spirit runs through my blood". Picardie's best friend hanged herself six years previously, and her sister-in-law, Kirsty MacColl, was killed during the writing of this book (thereby becoming a character in it), so she does not lack for subject matter in her task of pondering life after death.
She describes the self-deceiving ruses and mental tricks that people use to relate to the dead, such as attempting to send emails to Ruth in heaven (returned "host not found"), and the dreams in which her sister comes back to baffle her. She passes from the bereavement counsellors with their banal New Age jargon to the even less tenable pseudoscientific language of the people who monitor spirits electronically: "The dead live in etheric wavelengths which operate at much higher frequencies than ours." She diligently follows instructions on how to record their voices with a variable-speed tape recorder (as the dead often talk fast and their voices need slowing down or running backwards). With pathetic inevitability, Picardie hears nothing on the tape but her own voice calling for her sister. Misery having burned out any sense of shame, Picardie tries all the techniques, regardless of absurdity: automatic writing, channelling, mediumship, Freudian analysis, spirit communication by computer spellcheck, and a trip to California for a truly awful conference, where her sister finally speaks to her to say she wouldn't be seen dead in a place like that.
Nothing Picardie encounters gives passable evidence of the survival of the dead in general or of her sister in particular, and the overall effect of her search is the opposite of enlightening. She has become open to all the feelings of bereavement only to see otherwise sensible people abandon all common sense. If this is the rediscovery of death, we were better off in denial.
