Novel Readings

I have come here to walk the earth as human. I choose to be disguised and camouflaged. I live in the faces of the most betrayed and ignored of all humans. I live in silence. I am the words trapped on the bitten tongue. I am more than a statistic. I am more than another hashtag. I live in the heart of the poor woman, the black woman, the elderly woman, the sick woman, the healer, the teacher, the priestess, the witch, the wife, the mother and the girl. I am Death and I am quick. I am a rabbit and I can vanish. I can be anything I want to be. I choose the unheard and unspoken. I live in the silent scream and I will be silent no more and I have so much work to do . . . 

Salena Godden’s Mrs Death Misses Death begins with a disclaimer. “Spoiler alert,” it says in part; “We will all die in the end.” “This work has a very high dead and death count,” it goes on:

Take with caution. Take your time. Do your lifetime in your own life time. If you are sensitive or allergic to talk of the dead or non-living things use this work in small doses. This is not a self-help brochure. This is not a guide to avoiding dying. if you think you are about to drop dead, please seek medical advice immediately.

If you find the tone of this passage disorienting (as I do), you have a sense of what it is like to read this strange, moving, provocative book. Its basic premise is that a writer, Wolf Willeford, meets Mrs Death (“she who is Death, the woman who is the boss at the end of all of us”), who appears in the form of an elderly black woman (“there is no more human more invisible”) and shares stories, poems, and recollections that Wolf eventually compiles into a memoir, the book we are reading. (Did this “really” happen, though? Towards the end of the novel Wolf a bit frantically wards off the possibility that Mrs Death was “Not a dream. And not a manifestation, not a hallucination, but a real, real, real, real . . . memory.”)

There is a sort of plot involving Wolf, Mrs Death, a desk, and a writer’s retreat in Ireland, as well as backstory about Wolf’s family. These details matter, but Mrs Death Misses Death is not really a novel you’d read for conventional story-and-character reasons. It is more interesting and memorable (for me, anyway) as a meditation on death, and thus, inevitably, on life: “when writing about Death,” as Wolf remarks, “you soon realise it isn’t all about Death and that you write about Life and the living.” Sometimes Mrs Death recalls specific deaths, individual or mass:

The other day—just one example—the other day, there I am sweeping through a town in Syria and I find I am in floods of tears I stop and stand there in the rubble and debris and I wonder why, why? What the fuck am I doing here again, so soon, again? Twice in one week? And that same day I am in America, in a school for another mass shooting, and I am there, roaring my eyes out, clearing through, collecting all these souls of terrified dead teenagers. Then I am out in the channel, off the coast of France, collecting the murdered souls of another sunk dinghy, a make-do refugee raft filled with desperate people escaping war but being left to drown on purpose. My work has been overwhelming. So much death and war and destruction, famine and murder.

Other times, it is death in general, not in the abstract but as a universal, that’s the topic, as when Wolf reminds us that it is all, always, “borrowed time”:

One by one we leave each other. We never know who might go next and when and where and why. I’ve often wondered how very different this living life would be if we were born with our expiry date stamped on our foreheads . . . I mean, if we knew exactly how long and little time we have left to love each other, maybe then we would all be more kind and loving. Imagine if we knew our death date. How differently we would live, maybe, and yes I know, maybe not.

As both of these passages show in their different ways, Mrs Death Misses Death is both a moral and a political calling to account. How can we bear to live in a world with so much cruel, needless death—but also, how can we carry on living as if we don’t know that it inevitably ends? How is it that both of these facets of our reality seem to make so little difference to how we live, to the choices we make, to the people we are, or aspire to be? Imagining your own death, and the deaths of everyone you care for, should, Mrs Death suggests, “be the death of the demanding chubby shit you were and the birth of the kind wise person you will become”:

Do not run away from the inevitable, the beautiful and glorious ending, the proof you lived, the life you lived. To live tasting metal is blood. To live saving tokens is death. To die is to have been alive, that is why you must life: live free, live wild, live true and live love alive. Let the fire burn you and the light blind you. Let your belly get full and fat and embarrass you. Let your words fall out and tumble carelessly and honestly. Let your passions be unlimited.

After all, as she says, “I am Mrs Death and I am coming for you all.”

The form of Mrs Death Misses Death is just barely novelistic: it is almost collage-like, with its poems, dialogues, letters, reminiscences, and monologues. Parts of it repeat or circle back on other parts. I can see finding it frustrating, or excessive, or overly insistent, including the excerpts I’ve quoted here so far. It is all those things at times, and also sometimes grim and bracing and haunting. It kept surprising me. It made me think, and it also made me cry, especially at the end, where six pages are left blank “as a silent memorial for all the names we do not know and cannot say”:

Please add your loved one’s name on one of these blank pages, maybe add a date, a memory or a prayer. In this one act of remembrance we will be united. From now on every single person who reads this book will know their copy contains their own dead . . . And in the future anyone who reads your copy of this book will read that handwritten name and speak it aloud . . . We share these names of our loved ones in the whisper of the last page turning, over the years to come.