High time to be talking about degeneration

<i>The Way of all Flesh: a celebration of decay</i> by Midas Dekkers, trans. Sherry Marx-Macdonald (Harvill, &pound;16.99, 282pp)

There are two despised characters in Jeanette Winterson's new novel, The.PowerBook, who eat corned beef and pickled onions and have conventional imaginations. "With some squinty-eyed, sweaty knowledge" they know "that by themselves they could never find anything in muck but muck." They would not like this book.

There are two despised characters in Jeanette Winterson's new novel, The.PowerBook, who eat corned beef and pickled onions and have conventional imaginations. "With some squinty-eyed, sweaty knowledge" they know "that by themselves they could never find anything in muck but muck." They would not like this book.

Midas Dekkers is a Dutch biologist who has previously written a study of erotic liaisons between humans and animals, which was published in English as Dear Pet. He has now written an equally mischievous rhapsody about death and decay. Its most affectionate passages also involve animals - he extols toads, for example, for their "pug-facedness" and "sudden appearances out of dark, dank corners" - but its most serious sections celebrate transitoriness.

The contemporary obsession with perfect bodies and eternal youth is ugly and shallow, he thinks. Decay and death are central experiences not only of what it means to be a human being, but of all eco-systems. They ought to be glorious.

Some of his provocations are refreshing -"the only interesting thing about a baby is its future" - and others are more arch and wearisome. The book brims with charming anecdotes. Dekkers recalls that after the Luftwaffe dropped incendiary bombs on the Natural History Museum in 1940, the fire brigade turned out to douse the flames, and their hoses brought to life some seeds which had been brought from China in 1793. The seeds had been kept in a cupboard for decades, but now began to grow into silk trees. Dekkers loves the idea of new life springing from old seed, and dwells longingly on the "high-spirited spermatozoa" of very old men.

His intentions are estimable and heartfelt. He loathes the discrimination against old people that is now central in industrialised cultures. The trouble, he thinks, is that old people are only accorded high status when they are scarce.

Dekkers also analyses the attractions of "the venerable" in buildings and art. Like Rose Macaulay in her wonderful book The Pleasure of Ruins, he savours romantic ruins. "A lot of glory is simply at its best if it's decaying," he argues. "More beautiful than beauty is the ruins of beauty."

He manages to dart from the ephemeral pleasure of building a castle against the incoming tide to the fire-bombing of Cologne without seeming in excessively poor taste.

Some rotten, decayed foods cause revulsion, but others are prized as a delicacy. He recounts how the ancient Romans fermented the salted entrails of fish until they were rank, and then used them as a highly desired garnish. People who like eating hare think it's better when it's high; and the Swedes have a nauseatingly acrid form of rotten herring of which they are exceptionally proud.

The chapter on what happens to bodies after death is enough to stop one eating. The work of worms, maggots, vultures, crows, beetles and bacteria are described by Dekkers with brisk and ruthless satisfaction. He sustains his points with some uncompromising photographs of corpses and their parasites. Indeed, over 130 black and white pictures have been selected for The Way of All Flesh, and their overall effect is compelling.

Many people will buy the book for its gruesome images and may not bother to do more than skim the text. There are some witty, thought-provoking cartoons, as well as images of the ruined architecture of vanished civilisations, but it is the macabre pictures that really resound. These include a leper wearing dark shades, a priapic corpse mummified in a peat bog in Friesland, a woman dying in an American gas chamber and the skeleton of Siamese twins. Some of these pictures are distressing: a smiling child, holding a cat, but bald, wrinkled and toothless like a centenarian, illustrates the effects of the rare ageing disease progeria.

Dekkers is a clever writer who is a little too pleased with himself in the role of gadfly. The Way of All Flesh will give pleasure to those much obsessed by death, who see the skull beneath the skin. It will bore or offend eaters of corned beef and pickled onions who never see anything in decay but decay.

Richard Davenport-Hines's book 'Gothic' is now a Fourth Estate paperback