The Dutch aren't afflicted by our Victorian sqeamishness, so it makes for dank reading when Midas Dekkers, Holland's most famous pop biologist, gets stuck into death and decay in his folksy, opinionated, middlebrow way. At first he is almost poetic: wildflowers that thrive on ruins; the perverse, custom-built ruins of 19th-century Romantics; or Albert Speer's Ruin Value Theory, that buildings should be built to decay majestically.
He's more mildewy when sampling foods like surstromming, the Swedish delicacy rotten fish. Butchers, he argues, are dealers in carrion, not fresh meat, otherwise beef would be in rigor mortis; while day-old stew is "filled with the defecation of a million staphylococci".
He cranks up a gear with our ageing process: free radicals eroding our cells; the way teeth last skeletons than living mouths; how our senses fade, tissues and organs shut down, and we bald and gray - a fate we share only with African buffaloes, apparently. After death, Dekkers flinches from the image of a time-lapsed dead mouse, "a sack race of maggots" from eggs laid by flies rapidly attracted by rotting gases like skatole. He celebrates the grey flesh fly (sarcophaga Carnaria) which lays ready-made larvae, and the fat flies which eventually explode off our little mouse corpse.
Dekkers also riffs through celebrated mummies like the four, who died in 1609, found in the little Friesian church in Wieuwerd; or the 48 bodies found in Holland between 1791 and 1951, all pickled in sphagnum bogs; or more recently, the man found in a Tyrolian glacier, his leather jacket and hay in his shoes intact after 4000 years. While talking of death, Dekkers couldn't resist delving into Herodotus' tales of necrophiles like the tyrant Periander; or how ancient Egyptians retained the bodies of high-status women for days, after someone caught an embalmer in flagrante delicto. More chilling is the Belgian, identified only as 59-year-old E. M. from Etterbeek, who, when he was arrested in 1996, was found with masses of child pornography - and worse: photographs of 1,630 dead children, taken over 40 years in graveyards and mortuaries, where E. M. often posed as a member of the family.
Dekkers raises the hair on your head, but he flits from topic to topic like an intellectual blowfly, dropping poisonous little asides such as "You can no more restore a landscape or a painting to its original state than turn an old woman back into a little girl."
Apart from the pungent text, the pages are littered with pics of teratological curios: stuffed orang utans, eroded gargoyles, smiling corpses, invalids at Lourdes (holy water he describes as a "hotbed of contagion"), a woman's purse made out of a toad; or 19thcentury Dutch physician Frederik Ruysch's pickled child's arm holding a deflated eyeball.
It'll be interesting to see if this book fares well, or whether its intimate insight into Dutch thought will simply appal the English-speaking world.
Mic Moroney is a journalist and critic