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 Here's my latest piece in Literary Review – a round-up of recent books about death and longevity [the wording differs very slightly from the printed version]...

End of the Line

‘It is the strangest of all truths. We will all die. We all know we will die. But few of us truly believe we will die, few of us can imagine we will die.’ So begins Richard Coker’s Timor Mortis: How We Live With Death (New Modern Arcade 296pp £20). It’s a promising start to a wide-ranging study of the many dimensions of death, and how our understanding of it has changed over time. Coker describes his book as a ‘hybrid memoir’, and it draws heavily on his experiences as a physician and public health specialist, with something too of his personal life. He is clearly a humane and intuitive doctor, strongly opposed to the practice of medicine as ‘engineering without art’, which in extremis can lead to doctors becoming ‘torturers’. ‘Tenderness and truth’, he writes, should always trump ‘technological bravado’, particularly with patients who are nearing death. As for ‘assisted dying’, he knows from experience that ‘all good doctors have assisted dying’.
   In a chapter he describes as a ‘rant’, Coker gives the ‘wellness’ industry a well deserved kicking. It is, he writes, the domain of ‘grifters and charlatans’, a big-money business that fills the void left by the medical profession having failed those who fear dying, and those who are dying. Timor Mortis might have benefited from a bit more shaping and focus – and there are surprising omissions, for example in the chapter on ‘Legacy’ there is nothing on that increasingly difficult phenomenon, the digital afterlife. However, there is much to value in this book, not least his wise, unfashionable conclusion that ‘we should think about death every day – not to overcome our fear of it, but so that our fear brings greater fulfilment to our brief time on Earth’.
   Terry Eagleton claims that he intended A Death of One’s Own: Reflections on Mortality (Yale 296pp £18.99) to be published posthumously, but ‘publishers don’t much like dead authors, partly because they aren’t available for publicity events’. He describes the book as ‘more a montage of objects than a single unfolding argument’. It is a high-energy tour of various ways in which western culture has reflected on death, now philosophical, now literary, now personal, always richly rewarding, and often funny, especially in a section devoted to Eagleton’s years as a notorious academic drunk. He has a way with the throwaway gag, and his learning is always lightly worn. Referencing the title of his book and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, he writes that ‘to have a death of one’s own is as rare as one of Virginia Woolf’s housemaids owning a room of her own’. He sees death as, in his case, ‘the ultimate contrascriptive’, the thing that will finally put a stop to his writing.
  Death is ‘what falls down the crack’ between the living and the dead, neither of whom can actually experience it: it is, as Wittgenstein says, ‘not an experience in life but the limit of such experience’. ‘Not being alive,’ writes Eagleton, ‘is a lot more objectionable than being dead.’ He characterises death as ‘both unremarkable and inconceivable’. This is a book densely packed with such pithy insights – so densely packed, in fact, that it is best read a chapter at a time. It ranges far and wide over literature and philosophy, while taking enjoyable potshots at such enemies as postmodernism and smartphones. Eagleton is both a Marxist and a Christian, and the tension between the two gives his work a distinctive energy. A Death of One’s Own contains, rather surprisingly, an eloquent passage on what heaven might be like, and another in which he movingly writes of an aging father facing his coming death as he and his intellectually impaired daughter listen together to ‘Beautiful Dreamer’. There is a lot more to Eagleton than mere cleverness – though, heaven knows, he is clever.
   Death being what it is, many would sooner avoid it, or at least add decades to their lives – surely it wouldn’t be too much to ask of modern science, would it? Yes, it would, answers Saul Justin Newman resoundingly in Morbid: Debunking Modern Longevity Science (MIT Press 312pp £27), a blistering attack on the shaky science and wishful thinking that characterises the whole field of longevity research. The wishful thinking even extends into identifying the oldest living human beings. The 1979 Guinness Book of Records would have told you that it was 137-year-old Charlie Smith, a blatant fabulist who became a huge celebrity on the basis of absolutely no reliable documentary evidence. Now the official ‘oldest human being’ record is held by Jeanne Calment, who supposedly died at the age of 122, but this was probably a case of imposture (by her own daughter). When Newman began looking into such matters, he got a shock: ‘I had just discovered that tens of thousands of the world’s oldest living people were secretly dead’ – and more surprises were to come, including the non-existence of ‘blue zones’, parts of the world full of happy, healthy centenarians. When the Japanese investigated their supposed abundance of centenarians, over eighty per cent were found to be dead or untraceable, while in Greece, similarly blessed with centenarians, more than seventy per cent of them mysteriously disappeared.
  Newman moves on to junk the whole big-money longevity business, the supposed ‘cures’ for aging, the promises to reverse time, the morbid narcissism that fixates on the body and dreams of endless youth, the ‘venture-capital vampires’ homing in on this lucrative field of pseudo-medicine. There is something eye-popping on practically every page of this closely researched, vividly written book, which ends on a hopeful note – not about humans, but cereal crops, whose life has been extended dramatically in recent years: ‘I do not care to have an immortal, bilious billionaire, but I cannot wait for perennial wheat, maize or oats.’ Meanwhile, however, ‘the big-bang reproduction of bad ideas continues apace in aging research…’
  Seamus O’Mahony’s The Longevity Delusion: Money, Myths and Bad Science (Head of Zeus: Apollo 288pp £20) covers much of the same ground as the later chapters of Newman’s book, presenting an authoritative critical overview of the longevity industry. ‘Because we now live so long,’ writes O’Mahony, ‘we have never feared death so much’ – which is why many are so desperate to believe that science is on the verge of a breakthrough that will extend all our lives, despite the undeniable fact that ‘no intervention … has ever been shown to extend longevity in humans’. O’Mahony meets and interviews many of the leading figures in the field, including the charismatic Rasputin-like figure Aubrey de Grey and the ultimate scientist-entrepreneur David Sinclair, each of whom gets chapter to himself. The author also meets ‘biohackers’, those ‘devotees of a new religion, where the body – the self – is God’. And he reports from the Dublin Longevity Summit, where, ‘over the four days and countless talks and panel discussions, nobody made even a passing reference to the fact that the main limiters of healthspan [length of healthy life] and lifespan are poverty, lack of education and social inequality. Then again, why would they?’ Quite – that’s not where the money is.