Mrs Death Misses Death: Salena Godden

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Mrs Death herself is reluctant to allow her memoir to be transformed into a bleak work, preferring laughter and cheerfulness. A vital and beautiful collection that tells a new story of female history through a hundred and one objects, some extraordinary and others everyday.

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. A compassionate yet literarily innovative novel, which is a rare but wonderful combination and a novel that really should feature on the Booker and Goldsmiths Prizes. But although the book’s frame of reference is up to the minute, wrongful deaths are nothing new, so occasional vignettes dramatize untimely demises – especially of black women – across the centuries: from the days of slavery to Jack the Ripper to police custody a few years ago.I worked two jobs, my first job was working backstage at The Theatre Royal Drury Lane during the first run of Miss Saigon. Take today and down it in one, take today like a shot of petrol and set your day alight…Take today and fuck it like the last fuck in Pompeii as burning lava covers your home. Put it this way, I do not feel comfortable standing here reading this speech and so because of that I am glad to be here. When you keep putting something off, you berate yourself and put yourself down for not getting something finished.

Reading the middle sections, I want more plot, more of Wolf’s story and more of the dead character’s stories. As complicated as this may sound, these different viewpoints mix together and create a flow like a river carrying sticks, leaves and bones along its way, each one separate and yet part of the same.After a few characters are revealed to be women, Godden pokes fun at the reader and challenges the assumption that titles such as Dr are more commonly used by men.

Mrs Death’s emphasis on women who kill is deliberate, as is the fact that she has chosen to appear in female form: “For surely only she who bears it, she who gave you life, can be she who has the power to take it? As the early drafts of the book developed I started collecting deaths, near deaths and unmourned deaths, invisible deaths and celebrity death and writing about them.

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. The friction-free blending of poetry and prose invites space into this book, which Godden uses to communicate the two poles of expressing grief: when loss fills us with words, and when it robs us of the ability to communicate what we desperately want to about those dear to us. The book weaves together poetry and prose exquisitely, giving this novel about dying a lively pace (pardon the pun).

We follow two characters who are struggling, with life, with death, and we get into their heads and see how much their existences have taken a toll on them, and whilst the book is about death it’s also heavily centred on mental health. Salena Godden’s life-affirming firestarter of a debut novel, Mrs Death Misses Death, is out this week in two beautiful special editions.Salena Godden describes Mrs Death as a "poor old black woman" because Death is invisible and there's no one in the human world more invisible than her and "only she who is invisible can do the work of death. Through the acquisition of a 'magic' desk, Wolf (whose mother perished in the tower block fire) learns to hear the voice of Mrs Death whose silenced profile and invisibility make her, of course! By the time Wolf reveals “But what if this passion and fury and all this writing were always just the ramblings of an imbalanced mind? But in times of difficulty, when you are in pain and trauma, accidents and emergencies, you draw breath together, you connect, you’re most tuned in and alive and alert. It is subtle in its revelations, building repetitions of phrases in taut moments of anxiety and panic attacks, leading to the quiet shock of an unveiling.