1. Mrs Death Misses Death, Salena Godden
Disclaimer:
This book contains dead people.
This book cannot see the future. This book is dabbling in the past. This book is not about funerals although funerals are mentioned. You do not have to wear black to read this work. You do not have to bring flowers.
Caution: This work contains traces of eulogy.
Warning: This work contains violent deaths.
Spoiler alert: We will all die in the end.
This book by the activist and performance poet Salena Godden is one of the more original books I have read recently - I would say it's like nothing else I've read but I don't think that's quite true (see below). It manages to be sad, bleak, horrifying, funny and strangely comforting at the same time.
The idea of the book is that death is not a mysterious male figure in a black robe, but a black woman - sometimes a homeless woman carting enormous bags of empty bottles, sometimes the cleaner mopping outside your hospital room, sometimes a young Nina Simone, gorgeous and shimmering. Mostly, people don't notice her: “there is no human more invisible, more easily talked over, ignored, betrayed and easy to walk past” than a black woman, she says.
Mrs Death wants to tell her story, she wants to talk about the frustrations and the heartbreak that come from who and what she is (having expected that humans would live longer as we evolved but exasperated to see the many new ways that we have come up with to harm ourselves and one another). The book is a series of conversations between Mrs Death and Wolf, an East-London-based poet, traumatised as a child after escaping an awful house fire in which their mother died.
The conversations, and the poems and songs that are threaded between them, are told in a meandering, stop-start fashion, making playful use of language, frequently using humour, often touching on real-life or imagined terrible stories. This is no abstract consideration of death for all the use of allegory and symbolism - Godden wants us to look at Grenfell, at the deaths of refugees drowning in the channel, at the Moors murders, she doesn't let us look away. She particularly wants us to consider social injustice and the vulnerability of marginalised people of different kinds.
I said that I wouldn't say that this was unlike anything I'd read before, and the writer that Godden really reminds me of is Ali Smith - the same fragmented, exploratory, vibrant use of language, the same urgency of character voice, as though someone was talking in your ear. I thought her blurry magic realism was similar to Smith too - the way that you're not sure whether you're dealing with the supernatural, or madness, or just a good story.
Ultimately, for me, this book wasn't a complete success. It doesn't really have a plot as such, and I felt it ran out of steam after an exhilarating start. The ambiguity over who the characters are and their relationship to one another meant that I wasn't sure whether the ending was supposed to represent a resolution of some kind. It felt, ultimately, a bit all over the place. But a very strong, original and incentive piece of writing.