Mrs Death Misses Death: Salena Godden

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A previous chapter “Mrs Death: I know a Lot of Dead People Now” which philosophises that knowledge and recognition of the inevitability of death (not just yours but the death of all your family and friends) is vital for life, is both mirrored and countered in a final prose section “Wolf: The Tower” where Wolf encounters Life who says that living your own life fully for the moment and in the knowledge of the life of all your friends and family is what life is really about. Mrs Death Misses Death is a short novel, but is moving, and at times, difficult to read due to the subject matter.

It’s the idea of when you’re not speaking your truth, and not saying something you really want to say,” she explains. “When you keep putting something off, you berate yourself and put yourself down for not getting something finished. It’s easy to have a really good idea, it’s difficult to finish something, isn’t it? So to pursue it, and to persist in finishing it, hurt, but it hurt a hell of a lot more giving up.” There were a few spots where I thought the content repetitive and wondered if the miscellany format distracted from the narrative, but overall the book more than lives up to its fantastic cover, title, and premise. And with the pandemic’s global death toll rising daily, it could hardly be more relevant. An astonishing, fragmentary, genre-defying, debut novel by the English performance poet and activist Salena Godden.

The effect is to produce a collage of speech and speechlessness, a story that sometimes slips away from you even while you are reading it, becoming a memento mori in form as well as content. In other words, it’s exactly the sort of thing you expect when a poet writes a novel, and exactly the sort of thing you’ll devour if you like huge helpings of experimentation with your fiction. Let's start with a couple things: this is not a novel, story or even really a narrative of any kind. Second, I skimmed the last half hoping for some semblance of an "ah-ha, I get it" moment; but sadly it never materialized. While I didn’t absolutely love it, I know there are others who may enjoy it. I think one thing that really stood out for me was Mrs. Death saying, From there, her narration and how she spoke started to form, imagining how she might write letters or diaries or songs or poems, what she might eat, or how she might appear, as Billie Holiday, as Nina Simone, as well as the girl behind the counter selling your tobacco, or the woman in the hospital mopping the floor in the cancer ward. Kind of invisible as well as prominent – powerful.”

Mrs Death Misses Death: This is about you and me and us. This is her story, the story, the story of the life and the time of the death of us. This is the life of life and the time of time. For what a time it is and what a time it was and what a time it will be. The Dance of Time and Life and Death, the hours and the breath, the sky and space. The last big sleep. All your fears are here, all your fears are inside here. I believe this was supposed to be a unique, powerful 'story' told partially by the character of Death herself (yes a woman), and by a confusing character named Wolf. We get a couple other random commentary chapters thrown in for good measure but mostly it's about Wolf's struggles with mental health and the idea of why we live; and Death's remorse at having to take lives (plus some extensive comments on when people are 'misses' or nearly die). There could have maybe been a timeline set-up here that was manageable or could be followed; but the way the book is written it just gets lost. The tone of Mrs Death Misses Death is the equivalent of starting an essay with: ‘Good afternoon. My essay will cover the topic of X. In this essay, I will explore X, Y, and Z.’ …while also struggling to hit the required word count. It was somehow simultaneously convoluted and too on the nose.These are the collected memoirs of Mrs Death, edited and compiled by me, Wolf Willeford. I’m a poet and I live in the attic rooms of the Forest Tavern in East London. Contained here are some of Mrs Death’s private diary entries, some stories, poems and pieces of conversations I have had with Mrs Death; she who is Death, the woman who is the boss at the end of all of us. I share this hoping that it is the beginning of your own conversation with yourself and with your own precious time here. The author’s depiction of Mrs Death is of a woman who enjoys an evening by the TV with Wolf, a glass of red wine in hand, rather than the traditional scythe. Dreary is simply not her style. The absurd is also employed as a safe space to explore uncomfortable truths about life (and death). The character of the Desk - more specifically Mrs. Death’s desk - communicates its disappointment at the cards it has been dealt by fate. Godden does not leave her reader dismayed as she ultimately concludes that living is a ‘glorious mess’ and knowing that we are alive should make us live as even better people. Mrs Death Misses Death is an irresistible novel which speaks equally to the act of living as it does to the inevitability of dying. Honoured by this role, Wolf’s relationship to Mrs Death forms the basis of the story, in addition to containing elements of Death’s own writings. Moving between the dawn of time to the present day, Mrs Death Misses Death interrogates the big questions we ask about dying whilst also focusing on the personal, through stories from the Willeford family tree.

The voice of the furniture allows for these same insights into the pain of living to be developed whilst maintaining the light tone which eases the discomfort of truth. Mrs Death Misses Death should not, however, be dismissed as simply a darkly humorous book. Godden’s observations on mourning are particularly potent as she derives meaning from the mundane, from the objects we choose to keep to the way we might be innocently ‘ordinary’ in our unawareness of how our worlds will irrevocably change. She decides as a result to unburden herself to a young writer Wolf Willeford – who she first encountered when Wolf escaped from a Grenfell Tower type incident in which his mother died (his father having earlier committed suicide by drowning). Wolf, then nine, sees Death and rages at her and that memory, which has persisted with her, causes her to reveal herself to him and to share her memories and thoughts by way of an antique desk which Wolf finds himself acquiring. The Writing It is clear Salena Godden can write. This is my first introduction to her work, and As someone who went to secondary school and sixth form college in Sussex but was unable to make it to university this is such a wonderful honour. Thank you to all at West Dean and Sussex University. Thanks also to my brother Gus and partner Richard who were there too . I send congratulations to my fellow Fellows: Sue Timney, Joanna Moorhead and Alexandria Dauley and congratulations also to all the amazing graduate students I met and chatted with that day. She’s tired of it, tired of male pronouns taking over the world when men are brought to death just the same as women

I'm sure there will be people out there that love this and think it truly bohemian and adore it's uniqueness. I am not one of those people in this instance. The Gordon Burn Prize recognises literature that is forward-thinking and fearless in its ambition and execution, often playing with style, pushing boundaries, crossing genres or challenging readers’ expectations. Nearly 4.5) Grief Is the Thing with Feathers meets Girl, Woman, Other would be my marketing shorthand for this one. Poet Salena Godden’s debut novel is a fresh and fizzing work, passionate about exposing injustice but also about celebrating simple joys, and in the end it’s wholly life-affirming despite a narrative stuffed full of deaths real and imagined.

Salena Godden appears at The Fountain's Evening of Quarantine Dreaming , 25 Feb, 9pm, part of Paisley Book Festival

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Mrs Death Misses Death may on the surface be a book about loss and endings but it is also a brave and funny view of living, and the space between the two. There is life here, and humour, and a challenging viewpoint. The book is filled with strong female and non-binary characters, grappling with the sheer exhaustion of holding their shit together and coping with the shape of the world. This doesn’t read as clever or intelligent to me. Harambe? Is that supposed to be funny? It feels outdated. Exploring death Let’s be real, we are all going to die, yet, this is something I don’t think we talk a lot about. Or if we do it is generally clouded in fear. Death is the only thing we have surety about yet, as the book says, we don’t call it by name when it happens. We say, “pass on, passed…” anything but death. Without death, there is no life, and I enjoyed how the author was able to position death as something we should think about, maybe not harp on but at least think about. I liked that it is a troubled young writer who had experiences with people dying that got to have a friendship with Death. That for me really gave the theme the depth it needed. Historical Look In the book Mrs. Death refers some deaths that made international news, or deaths that are still unsolved or you may not know about. I think getting a little history lesson within the book worked so seamlessly.