Across time and cultures, human beings have known that death is the one big truth. Even if we have constructed narratives (religions) that posit something beyond it, death's finality is difficult for us to face. Nobody comes back from the grave - although some, such as Abraham Lincoln, do manage up to 17 reburials.

Jesus won his stripes, of course, because, after first practising on Lazarus, he then raised himself, and, on doing so, raised his own status considerably. Resurrection proves a point. If you can beat death you aren't human. Our mortality is our humanity.

Melanie King's The Dying Game takes us on a fact-filled tour of what happens to a cadaver, illustrating along the way our attitudes to what the Encyclopaedia Britannica defined, in 1768, as “the separation of the soul and body”.

In our secular times, that definition of death hardly holds, but one of the things King's compendium reminds us of is that there has always been a problem in diagnosing and defining death. In Germany in the 1800s, Leichenhauser (waiting mortuaries) were established. Bodies stayed in these areas for several days to ensure that they really were dead. Bloating and exploding cadavers must have kept many an attendant awake at night. But the nose knows: once putrefaction starts, death is a certainty. The fear of taphephobia (premature burial) led some entrepreneurs to develop coffins that would allow communication with the outside world. These days many people simply asked to be buried with a mobile phone.

From embalming, commemoration, grave-robbing, via the use of collagen skinned from Chinese prisoners, to how new technology is altering our relationship to death (her final and finest chapter), King marshals an array of fascinating information. But she seems almost absent from the text, and this mars her study considerably, making it seem merely a macabre miscellany. Interesting anecdotes do pepper her pages (Thomas Hardy overseeing the exhumation and reburial of 40,000 corpses unceremoniously dug up during the 1860s routing of the Midland Railway through St Pancras is priceless) but overall the book fails to come alive.

The Dying Game: A Curious History of Death by Melanie King
Oneworld £12.99 pp217 Buy the book £11.69 plus free delivery

Read Mark Thwaite's literary blog Ready Steady Book

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