Carnival of the dead
Carnival of the dead, Mexico

All the Living and the Dead (Raven Books) by Hayley Campbell

This Party’s Dead (Unbound) by Erica Buist

Our awareness of our own mortality, and attempts to keep death at bay, are arguably the reason we do anything at all. The fear of ceasing to exist has fuelled entire religions and often tediously complicated visions of the afterlife. So is death the biggest subject of them all? The authors of two new books on the theme – Hayley Campbell and Erica Buist – would probably say so. “We all find ways, regardless of our beliefs, to believe in our own immortality,” writes Buist. “Some of us, ahem, write books.”

Both authors are based in the UK, and it can seem like the British are particularly dreadful at confronting death head-on. It is not that dying is taboo: we are in fact surrounded by it. “Death is everywhere, but it’s veiled, or it’s fiction,” writes Campbell in All the Living and the Dead. “Just like in video games, the bodies disappear.” Buist makes a similar point, in This Party’s Dead, that our entertainment empires are built on piles of corpses. “And yet,” she writes, “when it comes to our own, we blanch.”

These books are interested in why we fear death, and how best to confront our preoccupation with it. Campbell tackles these questions in a journalistic manner, by talking to people in the death trade and seeking out “unromantic, unpoetic, unsanitised visions of death”. Buist’s is a more personal journey, starting with a definite trigger: discovering the body of her soon-to-be father-in-law, eight days after his death at a relatively young age. This traumatic moment leads her on a journey around the globe, to seven festivals or “parties” where they celebrate the dead.

Despite their different approaches, the books share some common refrains. One is around silence. “Nobody wants to say the wrong thing, so nobody says anything,” as Campbell puts it. As we hear through her interviewees, this squeamishness can be counterproductive, to say the least. She writes at various points about it being better for a loved one to see a dead body – closure is important, even if it is of a gruesome kind. Buist draws the same conclusion: in Nepal, Indonesia and Sicily, people are hands-on with the dead, even, in Madagascar, digging them back up every seven years to party with them.

Both authors are also interested in the gendered aspect of death. “Men weren’t interested in deathcare until they thought they could make money from it,” says one of Buist’s interviewees. Campbell writes that before the business of death became commercialised, “The bookends of life were considered to be the realm of women.”

Now the death industry is a significant part of the global economy, and one that Campbell explores with an interest that is infectious. You can almost see her, notebook and dictaphone in hand, taking in the smells and the often horrific sights as she talks to an embalmer, a grave digger or a maker of death masks. (She can apparently watch bodies being hacked apart with few qualms.)

Buist’s writing, meanwhile, is more novelistic and self-conscious. Her characters can sometimes come across as conduits for heart-warming messages that are a little too neat for comfort:

“We’ve got it all, and we’ve just got to face it, never deny it, and never fear death. Dance with the dead. Dance with death, and it’ll teach you the right steps.”

That said, it’s a book full of parties, so it would be unfair to criticise it for being too upbeat. And there are lessons to be learned here, especially for the British, about how we could change our attitude to death for the better. In Sicily, for example, the dead leave presents for the living, like
Father Christmas. This kind of celebration seems more fun, as well as more sensible. As Buist writes, “I imagined growing up associating the dead with a treasure hunt, a sugar hit and a gift, instead of an awkward silence, averted gazes and the obligatory muttering of ‘very sad’.”

But there are, to put it bluntly, simply more interesting insights and arresting details in All the Living and the Dead. Campbell meets people with horribly fascinating jobs: a crime scene cleaner who wipes up after a brain has sprayed up a wall; anatomical pathology technologists who have to sew dead babies’ heads back together; someone from a disaster response service that anticipates mass fatalities so that your company doesn’t have to. Her similes – describing, for example, a complex tumour as wrapping its way down a person’s spine “like the red stripe on a barber’s pole” – beg to be underlined. She has nightmares after seeing a dead baby fall helplessly underwater while being washed, yet resists the urge to become sentimental. “I try to suppress every built-in urge to stop him drowning,” she writes, “telling myself he is dead, realising that he is dead, that nothing I do here would matter or change the outcome of his being dead.”

Campbell’s book is also just recent enough to feature an afterword that acknowledges the coronavirus pandemic – an event so far-reaching that it has warped all of our experiences of mortality, as war would have done in the 20th century. After being witness to so much death, Campbell pictured each person as a body in a bag, not a statistic.

All the Living and the Dead triumphs in its mission statement: the reflections from the death workers are very unromantic indeed. Campbell draws conclusions, but these are not cliches. “By shielding ourselves from what happens past the moment of death,” she writes, “we deny ourselves a deeper understanding of who we truly are.”

This Party’s Dead also achieves its aim, in the sense that it seems to have partly been an attempt to find comfort for the author – and may, along the way, provide the same to us as readers. After trekking to several continents, Buist concludes, “Festivals for the dead aren’t for the dead, really. They’re for us.”

Despite the billions of words others have scribbled down about death, both Buist’s and Campbell’s books add something significant to the literature. Death can galvanise a writer to raise their game. As the ultimate subject, its wordcount is rivalled perhaps only by love. It will continue to be the most immense inspiration, as long as we are unable to escape its clutches. The upside here is that we’ll be treated to a lot more fabulous books.

This piece is from the New Humanist summer 2022 edition. Subscribe here.