What working with the dead
MEMOIR
ALL THAT REMAINS: A LIFE IN DEATH by Sue Black (Doubleday £16.99)
Here’s a book about death, everyone’s favourite subject. Will we die tomorrow, in an appalling car crash? Or will we go on for several more decades, creaking, greying and slowly crumbling into dust?
Personally I plan to go on forever, but then I am what one of my friends calls a ‘denial monkey’. It’s probably for people like me that this book is most useful.
sue Black of Dundee University is one of the world’s leading anatomists and forensic anthropologists. Death is her trade, and has been ever since her teenage years, when she had a saturday job in a butcher’s shop. ‘I loved the clinical precision involved in the butcher’s craft...I learned not to bite my fingernails, never to place a knife on the block with the blade facing upwards and that blunt knives cause more accidents than sharp ones.’
It’s probably fair to say there’s slightly more blood and gore in this book than in most about science.
Black distinguishes between forensic pathology and her own rather lesserknown career. ‘Forensic pathology seeks evidence of a cause and manner of death — the end of the journey — whereas forensic anthropology reconstructs the life led, the journey itself, across the full span of its duration,’ she writes.
This makes her, one might think, uniquely positioned to write a book as farranging as this one.
It is the work not of a professional writer, but of a highly gifted amateur who has a fascinating story to tell. However, Black has a second intention, and that is to demystify death altogether.
‘We talk about “losing” someone, whisper of their “passing” and, in sombre, respectful tones, we commiserate with others when a loved one has “gone”.
‘I didn’t “lose” my father — I know exactly where he is. He is buried at the top of Tomnahurich Cemetery in Inverness in a lovely wooden box provided by Bill Fraser, the family funeral director, of which he might have approved, although he would have probably thought it too expensive.’
As you can see, she has a lovely, strong and nimble voice, and if her prose style does occasionally slip into the mundane, you always forgive her.
Very roughly, the book’s first half is about her life — the first time she had to dissect a human corpse, the deaths of her parents, her brief (and by all accounts painful) television career.
The second half is about the things she