books

There is something deeply improbable about a book that can make you laugh out loud on public transit while reading about severed heads arranged in roasting pans, and yet Stiff pulls it off with such casual confidence that you barely notice the trick being performed. Mary Roach's 2003 debut takes the question of what becomes of our bodies after we are finished with them and treats it not as a morbid curiosity but as a genuine field of inquiry, one populated by crash-test engineers, forensic anthropologists, plastic surgeons, mortuary students and the occasional bewildered scientist being asked uncomfortably specific questions about penile tissue.

The chapters move through a surprisingly wide territory. Roach visits the University of Tennessee's body farm to watch donated corpses decompose in open ground, attends a face-lift refresher course where the subjects are forty disembodied heads, sits in on ballistics trials and car crash simulations, traces the history of body snatching through nineteenth-century anatomy theatres, and detours into chapters on medicinal cannibalism, human composting, head transplantation and the rather thorny question of whether beating-heart cadavers can be said to be truly dead. The organisation is loose but never aimless. Each chapter functions as a self-contained essay, which means skipping the section on crucifixion experiments or animal research is a legitimate option if a particular topic proves unbearable.

What makes the book work, more than the subject matter itself, is the voice. Roach writes like the sharp friend who cannot help herself at dinner parties, tossing off droll footnotes and admissions of her own morbid curiosity with a lightness that keeps the material from tipping into either solemnity or exploitation. The humour is not universally loved - there are stretches where the asides and the genital jokes feel like she is working a bit too hard to reassure the reader that it is all fine, and her affection for a certain celebrity doctor reads awkwardly in hindsight - but the balance she strikes between irreverence and genuine respect for the donors is remarkable. The dead are treated as collaborators in a long, strange project, and the living researchers she interviews come across as thoughtful people doing difficult work.

The prose occasionally pads itself with tangents when the on-site reporting runs thin, and the chapter on medical cannibalism relies more on urban legend than is entirely comfortable. The animal experimentation material is grim in a way the human material rarely is, and anyone expecting a deep dive into the embalming process specifically will find it treated more glancingly than they might wish.

Still, what lingers after finishing Stiff is not the gore but a kind of unexpected tenderness - the sense that the bodies we leave behind continue to do useful, even noble work, and that a book willing to laugh at death without mocking the dead is a rarer thing than it sounds. It is curious, funny, sometimes uneasy, and genuinely hard to put down.