A book review by Christopher Perfect The obituary pages of a newspaper do not immediately strike one as the richest resource for a life-affirming celebration of the journalists’ art. On picking up Marilyn Johnson’s book, you may be taken aback by the blurb, which describes her quest to ‘search for the best bits in the English language and to seek out those writers who spend their lives writing about the recently dead’. However, despite the odd, bordering on the morbid nature of the subject, Johnson’s book is a fascinating look at an aspect of journalism which, to say the least, is unlikely to leap to mind when an average Oxford undergraduate begins to consider their future career.One aspect of the obituary writers’ task which Johnson brings out superbly is the alternating rhythm of the job. We are all aware, for example, that the obituaries of the great, the good, the notorious and the disgraced are filed neatly away in every newspaper’s archives, waiting, as it were, for the appropriate bell to toll. But what do you do when, as in one case detailed by Johnson, a journalist, famous in the 70s, but mostly forgotten, suddenly commits suicide in the middle of a 3-day snowstorm and the only available writers are too young to know anything about his life? The chapter on the sudden pressure on the New York obituary writers after 9/11 is similarly revealing.A self-confessed obituary obsessive, (and that’s quite a confession to make, after all) Johnson is expert at bringing out the characters of the men and women (mostly men, it has to be said) she meets. As you might expect, the task of writing entirely about the dead affects those who have to do it; the life of one man who combined his work as an obituary writer with a job in counter-intelligence is just one of many striking individual stories which Johnson has discovered. Whether, as she claims, many newspaper readers go straight to the obituary pages of their daily newspaper rather than the news or the sport, or whether that is simply her own way of admitting to a rather idiosyncratic hobby, is less relevant than her ability to bring out interest and entertainment in a variety of journalism that will be unfamiliar to many of her readers.
Dead Beat — The Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries, by Marilyn Johnson
