Book review: The Dance Of Death: A Vanitas, by Martin Rowson

If you are looking for the perfect stocking-filler, then look no further. Martin Rowson is one of the country’s most ingenious satirical illustrators, and his work will be familiar from many publications. But he is also one of the most literary, having made graphic adaptations of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Das Kapital by Marx and Engels. He has also written a non-graphic work, Stuff, about the experience of clearing his parents’ house, at the same time as ruminating on being adopted. In this work, he is again in dialogue with another book, and one which would obviously appeal to a “cartoonist”; Hans Holbein’s work from 1523-6, The Dance Of Death. It itself was an update of the “danse macabre” genre, done especially to castigate the corruptions Holbein saw in the church, so an update of the update seems wholly appropriate. It is laugh-out-loud funny, but it is also a book to pore over rather than skim through, as the detail is delightful and frightful.