How should one write about death – not as experienced by those who merely witness it, but by the people doing the actual dying? Many attempts have been made, but some favourites barge to the front. In The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy terrifies both us and his eponymous magistrate with the “black sack” into which Ivan is being pushed by “an invisible, invincible force”. In Tobias Wolff’s Bullet in the Brain, a book critic is shot by a bank robber, triggering “a crackling chain of ion transports and neurotransmission” that throws up a random memory of a childhood game of baseball.
Will Self, in The North London Book of the Dead, looks beyond the moment of oblivion, suggesting that when we die we move to Crouch End or Grays Thurrock. In Immortality by Milan Kundera, the “other world” is a place where Goethe, out for a stroll, can bump into Hemingway. After the two men spend a bit of time discussing the rather judicial-sounding affairs of the afterlife, Goethe remembers he is in a postmodern novel and remarks, “You know perfectly well that at this moment we are but the frivolous fantasy of a novelist who lets us say things we would probably never say on our own.”
