Review 5: Gulp - Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach

When it comes to the works of Mary Roach, this ain’t my first Roach-eo - I’ve previously read and been entranced by Stiff, her foray into the world of corpses. But I still wasn’t expecting to like this book quite so much as I did. It’s one of the most enjoyable reads I’ve had for a long time.

Gulp is a hotchpotch journey down the alimentary canal - the big vacuum cleaner bag that runs from our mouths to our exit wounds. Roach isn’t writing a medical textbook here though. She follows the stories of things that sound interesting, or gross, or (regularly) both, so you end up with quite a lot of stuff that’s tangentially-related rather than a tube-by-tube account of your inner passages.

And that’s all for the betterment of the book. Here are a few facts and amusing asides I noted down during reading:

• Fabric softener works by slightly digesting the fibres of your clothes, using the same enzymes as in your guts.
• Painting restoration workers often spit on swabs to take layers off old artworks without damaging the paint. Saliva is by some way the most effective means of doing that, far more than any synthetic chemical alternatives.
• Some components of saliva can render viruses, including HIV, ineffective in most cases.
• The original Gospel of Mark had Jesus’ healing of the blind being only minimally effective. This bit was taken out so as not to diminish his reputation.
• The crunch of a crisp is literally a tiny sonic boom inside your mouth.
• The stomach, at death, begins to digest itself.
• At least one exorcism was conducted (to the apparent satisfaction of all) employing a Holy Water enema.

If you’re feeling scratchy and annoyed that I’ve spoiled all these things for you, don’t worry – this is a drop in the salivary ocean. The book’s absolutely chock-full of brilliant little nuggets (many of them about brilliant little nuggets). If you’re suggestible, you might find some of them hard to stomach (pun most definitely and unashamedly intended) but it’ll be worth the nausea, I promise.

The thing that elevates the book from ‘interesting’ to ‘superb’ is the sheer glee that Roach takes in her subject matter, packaging all this information up in a broad and infectious sense of humour. I rarely laugh aloud at a book, but this had me chuckling wheezily, to the likely annoyance of everyone else on the train. She’ll happily do things like start a sentence with: "If a man can be said to resemble a tooth...", or throw in little jokes for the hell of it, such as this rumination on the uvula: “Its full medical name, and my pen name should I ever branch out and write romance novels, is palatine uvula."

And her enthusiasm, like many of the diseases she enumerates, is really catching. The thing she really wants to get to the bottom (still not sorry) of is figuring out why people’s attitudes to their own guts tend towards disdain and disgust. She quotes one of the dozens of experts she consults with: “No engineer could design something as multifunctional and fine-tuned as an anus. To call someone an asshole is really bragging him up”. And after taking this fascinating, hilarious tour of our inner workings, I find it very hard to disagree.

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