Say what was that name you called me?
What was that grin you grinned?
An expression so uncertain
That breaks a line so thin?
“Commercial Breakup” (Thomas Dolby)
(Note: This is a review that I
wrote early last year, just after I read Death of the Living Dead. Had I
written it now, I would have done it very differently. However, I have decided
to leave it mostly as is. I still agree with its content, and it doesn’t bug me
to the extent that I want to go through the effort of revising it. Let’s just
say that it’s a snapshot of how I was writing reviews a couple years ago, and
be glad I didn’t start blogging then…)
The Barleycorns could, by any
definition of the word, be called an odd family. There’s the patriarch, Smiley,
a skilled mortician who, forced to leave England due to his womanizing ways,
emigrated to America and decided to reestablish his practice in a grand way,
founding the Smile Cemetery, the largest and most prestigious funerary
establishment on the east coast. There are his sons, John, a dour,
business-oriented man set to succeed his father as head of the house of the
dead, William, a would-be theatrical producer who’s always looking to secure
more funding, Jessica, Smiley’s only daughter, who married the son of one of
his business associates, and James, who, disconcertingly proud of his skills as
an embalmer, has no interest whatsoever in such trifles as the management of
the cemetery (and that’s without getting into the segment of the Barleycorn
siblings who have already shuffled off their mortal coil.). And there’s our
protagonist, Francis “Grin” Barleycorn, son of Steven Barleycorn, one of the aforementioned
late lamented, who, instead of joining the family firm, chose the life of a
punk rocker. From front to back, the Barleycorns are a family touched by death,
every one of them having worked in or trained for a role in the running of the cemetery,
but, in more ways than one, they’ll soon find that they don’t understand death
as well as the thought. For, all around the world, the dead are returning to
life. And, against the tableaux of these unnerving events, the Barleycorns will
be confronted with death in an even more immediate way when someone begins
killing them off. But who would want to kill in a world where the dead can come
back to life?
The first half of the novel is
rather slow moving, focusing mostly on the establishment of the setting,
characters, and themes, but it’s extremely riveting, as well as necessary to
the plot. If you don’t pay close attention here, I can assure you that you have
very little chance of solving the mysteries that follow. And once the plot gets
moving, it really gets moving. Between the killer stalking the
Barleycorns, the corpse that vanishes between its funeral and burial, and the
possible return of a serial killer from years back, you start to wonder how all
of this could possibly tie together.
But tie together it does. As unrelated
as they seem, all of these plot threads contribute to a solution that is astonishingly
elegant in its simplicity. Its central point is downright Chestertonian (which
is quite fitting, given how often he’s quoted here). It’s so blindingly,
elementally obvious that we (or at least I) never consider it.
And this isn’t the only similarity
to Chesterton. Like the Father Brown stories, Death of the Living Dead
is fundamentally a piece of humanistic detective fiction. Yamaguchi is
interested in exploring how people relate and react to death, both individually
and as a society. This exploration comes into focus well before the mystery
itself, but don’t think that they are unrelated concerns. The philosophic
questions at the heart of the novel are essential to the solution, and the mystery
throws the philosophical questions into sharp relief. Furthermore, to bolster
this theme, Yamaguchi includes well-researched information on subjects as
diverse as funerary customs, Medieval art, and the history of embalming. This
is the kind of mystery that Robert Burton or Sir Thomas Browne would have
written.
(At this point, there’s an aspect
of the novel’s that I’d like to discuss, but it’s something that some people
might consider a spoiler. To be clear, I don’t think it is, and it’s mentioned
in the table of contents anyway. Plus, most, though not all, of the reviews out
there mention it (and if you’ve read any of those, you already know exactly what
I’m talking about). Still, I certainly don’t want to spoil anyone’s reading
experience, so if you want to go in absolutely blind, skip the next paragraph
and come back when you’ve finished the book. For everyone else, read on…)
Perhaps the most striking thing
about Death of the Living Dead is the fact that Grin, who’s both the
protagonist and the detective, himself becomes one of the living dead early on
in the book, after he is poisoned with arsenious acid. The undead here aren’t
the shambling zombies of horror fiction, they retain their personalities and
memories. This puts him in the unusual position of having to catch his own
killer, but it also adds some extra complications. Chiefly, he has to hide the
fact that he’s dead, from both his family and his girlfriend, Cheshire, who
acts as his Watson. The only person he lets into his confidence is Dr. Hearse,
a close friend of his grandfather’s (and one of my favorite characters!), a
professor of thanatology and occasional consultant with the local police. Grin
has the good doctor embalm him, as coming back to life doesn’t stop the process
of decomposition. Aside from throwing a new wrinkle into the plot, this turn of
events also has another narrative function. Since only Grin and Dr. Hearse know
that someone poisoned Grin, everyone else investigating the Barleycorn killings
is in possession of imperfect information. The police can’t hope to solve these
killings, but Grin, and the reader, can.
Not that the police had much of a
chance to begin with. The local police are, shall we say, somewhat
dysfunctional. The sergeant gladly blabs everything he knows to the press, the
junior detective is only interested in two things, getting promoted and
slacking off, and the senior detective, Richard Tracy, is a workaholic who’s unhealthily
obsessed with his job. At first, he seems to be the force’s only sane man, but
as the crimes begin to pile up, Det. Tracy’s stress levels get closer and
closer to the breaking point. He also provides one of the novel’s absolute
funniest scenes. Near the end of the book, he proposes a false solution which
starts out brilliantly clever. However, as he goes on, flaws start appearing in
his explanation. They start out subtle, but by the end his audience is chiming
in one after another, pointing them out faster than he can keep up with.
As you may have guessed from Det.
Tracy’s name, the view of America in Death of the Living Dead is very
pop-culture influenced. This becomes apparent early on, particularly in the scene
set in NYC, which, with its boom-box carrying gangsters and corrupt cops, feels
like it could have come from an over-the-top 80s action flick. As strange an
atmosphere as this may seem for a classically styled puzzle-plot mystery, it
actually works quite well. After all, you wouldn’t exactly expect strict
realism from a novel where punks run around solving murders as the dead rise
from their graves…
As far as I can see, the novel only
really has one flaw, and not a major one at that. Near the beginning, it’s
stated that worldwide, thirteen people in total have returned to life.
Conceivably, some may have escaped risen unnoticed, but it couldn’t be that
many. So revivification seems to be a fairly rare phenomena, yet in the small
town of Tombsville, the living dead just keep on coming, in numbers that are
truly surprising, given how few rose before. Vaqrrq, ol gur raq, whfg nobhg gur
jubyr Oneyrlpbea snzvyl unf znqr gur erghea gevc (spoilers concealed using
rot13). Now, this isn’t a hard science fiction novel, and I’m not demanding
some kind of detailed explanation for this. But since we’re told at the
beginning that this is an uncommon thing, I think most experienced readers will
factor that into their theorizing. Unless told otherwise, we assume that
everything in a mystery could be relevant, so I wish that Yamaguchi had somehow
indicated that this wasn’t something we needed to pay attention to, rather than
just hoping that we don’t notice the mother of all statistical anomalies.
But, that said, I can’t say that
this even remotely impacted my enjoyment of the novel. I didn’t even notice it
until a few days after finishing it. And that I was still thinking about it
days later says a lot. Death of the Living Dead is a triumph as a novel
of detection, but it’s also a moving rumination on man and mortality. It’s a
book that I’ll not soon forget, and I highly recommend it.
(As I mentioned, I still agree with
everything in this review. But I do have a couple of things I’d like to add.
The first is actually something that I meant to mention in the review, but
which completely slipped my mind. It’s simply that I admire Yamaguchi’s choice
of chapter quotes. It takes skill to be able to use John Dickson Carr, Jorge
Luis Borges, and King Crimson in the same novel.
The
second point has less to do with the book itself, and more to do with its
reception. I’ve been shocked at how little attention it’s gotten since its release.
When it has been reviewed (on a handful of blogs and in the Washington Post)
it’s garnered high praise, but by and large it seems to have slipped under the
collective radar. And that’s a shame, because in my opinion this book is a
masterpiece of the genre and deserves a wide readership.)