Mrs Death Misses Death: Salena Godden

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Dark at times – with compelling stories about miscarriages of justice, murder and racial oppression – it is nonetheless celebratory and life-affirming, aglow with love, fortitude and compassion - Daily Mail I’m setting this aside at 50%, I’ve been dragging my feet through this book for months, and I just don’t think my enjoyment will change. I’m totally disappointed. I was primed to love this.

Godden has created a meditation on the sheer amount of wasted life we are accustomed to accepting as part of the cost of living, the avoidable tragedies that are the byproduct of extractive capitalism. Just as resolutely as Godden writes about how death is inevitable, she underlines again and again that so many deaths are preventable and that these tragedies need not be repeated. Nut until we find another way to live, they will. But Mrs Death has reached exhaustion and saturation – despite all the technology and communication available to mankind what she and her lover Time and sister Life had expected to be a quiet 21st Century, instead she has to control her sister’s Life fecundity and also deal with greater than ever untimely death “war and deconstruction, famine and murder”. It soon becomes apparent that as much as Wolf feels like they need Mrs Death to help them with their writing, Mrs Death needs Wolf too, she needs someone to talk to, to make her feel more human. But this also makes the book hard to read at times, because it’s not an easy topic to experience. 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.This doesn’t read as clever or intelligent to me. Harambe? Is that supposed to be funny? It feels outdated. Salena Godden is featured on the Waterstones blog about writing her debut novel, Mrs Death Misses Death, and how we respond to death across the country.

Salena Godden is known for the graphic power of her work and is one of the foremost poets in the UK, as well as an author and singer songwriter. I would read an excerpt in Edinburgh and the idea of Mrs Death would be met with a cheer and a ‘yay!’. And exactly the same excerpt down in Bloomsbury [would have] everyone crying, me crying, big hugs at the end … What it has got me thinking is, I wonder if there is a geography of mourning, a geography of grief.” All the reactions are welcome, though. She still thinks one of the scariest things about death is that it is so often surrounded by silence.’ A poet and memoirist, Godden is skilled at creating shapes with her words. She writes without arrogance. There is no pretence and no pretension, and when she gives us a more literary angle of her writing it is with a wink and a grin, with the full knowledge that she is mistress of her own pen. She does not shy away from the uncomfortable, either. If there are details that make the reader twitchy then there is no apology. In this work, she stands with the dead, with Mrs Death.

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.” 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. Salena Godden FRSL is an award-winning author, poet and broadcaster of Jamaican-mixed heritage based in London. Her debut novel Mrs Death Misses Death won the Indie Book Award for Fiction and the People’s Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the British Book Awards and the Gordon Burn Prize. Film and TV rights for Mrs Death Misses Death have been optioned by Idris Elba’s production company Green Door Pictures. Godden has been shortlisted for the 4thWrite short story prize and the Ted Hughes Prize. Her work has been widely anthologised and broadcast on radio, TV and film. Her poem Pessimism Is for Lightweights is on permanent display at the People’s History Museum, Manchester. She was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2022.

A modern-day Pilgrim’s Progress leavened with caustic wit . . . This is not light-hearted stuff, yet Godden has produced a miraculously light-hearted novel . . . an elegant, occasionally uproarious, danse macabre - Guardian

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The Premise: I can say I have never read a premise like this. Death herself gets someone to write a memoir about her life. INJECT THIS IN MY VEINS! I mean seriously, how utterly original is this premise. 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. Thank you NetGalley and Canongate for a copy of Mrs Death misses death by Salena Godden. When I requested this, I was expecting something completely different to what I just read in a good way. 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.” But I’m actually glad that we don’t get given a strong answer to this, that Godden allows the reader to look at the book and make up their own mind instead. Maybe we were hearing stories of people across time and their brushes with death, or maybe we just got to hear Wolf making up tales for their writing. In the end, it’ll mean whatever you want it to, and whatever conclusion you come to will be your own interpretation of this wonderfully dark, yet uplifting book that does its own thing in its own way.

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, 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. I am Death. I am a glorified rubbish collector. I am a cleaner. I clean. I collect the spirits up and carry all those burdens away.Mrs Death herself is both the most significant figure at the end of every life and yet the least significant in our everyday world: A family of monkeys feel loss when they lose a member of their group. The killing of Harambe! Why did they kill Harambe? Why don’t we respect and save the animals, Mrs Death? What will we do when the last elephants are extinct, Mrs Death? Who will save the turtles and the coral reefs and the rainforests? 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. 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. 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.