News

We are all aware of the horror and rot that, in a literal sense, lie beneath the surface of a graveyard. Charles Wilkins, by dint of a summer job at a suburban Toronto cemetery in 1969, has dug up the metaphorical rot, and no amount of "BalsamBlast grave disinfectant" can cover the stench.

It was the practice at Willowlawn Everlasting (not its real name), for instance, to keep an eye on the graves of those whose funerals are especially poorly attended. Should no flowers or other signs of familial tending appear, the bodies are dug up about 10 years hence and tossed in a common grave, and the plot resold. Flower arrangements are pilfered by staff. Cremains are mixed up. A whore named Emma turns tricks in the Garden of the Apostles of the Living Christ.

• In the Land of the Long Fingernails: A Gravedigger's Memoir, by Charles Wilkins, Viking Canada, 220 pages, $32

Because it is Wilkins working the allegorical backhoe, one feels not outrage but glee. Wilkins's writing is so sharp and tasty that it is possible to delight in learning that, say, Mafia-controlled mortuaries have been known to deliver double-decker coffins to their partner cemeteries to convey victims of mob hits to the ultimate hiding place: someone else's grave. If Raymond Chandler had written a memoir, I could imagine it reading like this. The city coroner is "a florid-faced squirt with wooden posture and a Reichstag haircut." Norman, a pimpled teenage slacker, has "a kind of sautéed sheen about his face." Loathed and drunken Willowlawn manager Scotty MacKinnon's face is a "pale mask of sagging wax" with a "million snapped capillaries."

Wilkins's keenest dudgeon is reserved for the grand hypocrisies of the cemetery industry - summed up best, I feel, by one of Scotty's barked work assignments: "Dogshit in Holy Blessed Virgin ..." It is a challenge to say which is the more repellant and absurd: the occasional illegal goings-on at Willowlawn or the legitimate day-to-day practices. Cemetery salesmen extol the advantages of the higher-priced real estate, selling views, birdsong, babbling brooks and cooling shade to entities that cannot see or hear or sweat or even feel superior to their neighbours on the fringes of the graveyard, where "the grass may be a little browner, the soil a little stonier, but the sexual opportunities and rate of unemployment tend to be about the same."

“ This is a cast of characters that needs only show up for work and commence gabbing and bickering, and you are content to spend your time with them ”

The ugliest element of the sales pitch concerns the pre-need policy. This consists of "the planting of the suspicion that, if left to them, one's relatives and heirs might eschew the expensive and dignified in favour of the cut-rate and chintzy, which is to say the cheap grave, leaving dear old Aunt Bigotty in eternal residence among the homeless, the garlic eaters, the artists, all the fuck-ups and non-conformists whom she has spent a lifetime scorning for their bad haircuts and seditious opinions and contemptible politics."

Wilkins has worked his factual shockers into a personal narrative as rolling and carefully landscaped as the grounds he tended. Not a lot happens, plot-wise - a strike, a missing gardener, a fling with the cemetery's first female gravedigger - but not a lot needs to. This is a cast of characters that needs only show up for work and commence gabbing and bickering, and you are content to spend your time with them.

The most spectacular character, of course, is Willowlawn itself. So much so that on the several occasions when Wilkins moves the action beyond the cemetery gates, takes the plot out of the plots, I found my interest flagging. Road trips and dates and the author's evolving friendship with colleague Luccio seemed like "cavity filler" in contrast to the guts and gore of the graveyard.

For all his descriptive venom, Wilkins seems to have retained a fondness for his Willowlawn cohorts. Even Scotty, whom we glimpse in the end staring across his desk "into the mystic fetches" beyond the narrator's shoulder, a quieted man broken down by the death of his wife of about 50 years.

At the very least, Wilkins displays a compassion truer than that promised by Trull Funeral Home, whose wall calendar, Wilkins notes, lists "compassion" and "understanding" in the same sentence with "city-wide limo service."

Though Wilkins insists that his summer among the "stinkers" gave him no insights into death, he turns around a half-page later and drops one as profound and poetic as anything served up by Dickinson or Dostoyevsky: "Death, like any other shadow, has no depth or interior, and is unknowable except as a stoppage of the light."

I don't know how Charles Wilkins escaped my notice until now, but I intend to read as many of his books as I can before I, too, end up in the land of long fingernails.

Mary Roach chronicled postmortem careers in Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. She has switched to warm bodies for her latest book, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex.