Chains of Consolation: Ghost-Writing Death’s Tales in Salena Godden’s Mrs Death Misses Death (2021)

Abstract

Salena Godden’s novel Mrs Death Misses Death (2021) brings the principle of ghost-writing to new symbolic grounds as the protagonist, Wolf Willeford, a young writer, turns the memories and diaries of Death herself into memoirs. Part poetical fiction, part song-book, the hybrid work compiles tales of death and mourning together with episodes of Wolf’s existence, thereby mingling legends with accounts of real-life events (such as the Grenfell fire of 2017). The combination of traumatic and magical realism carves a literary language for nested gestures of transmission (from Death to her ghost-writer, from Godden to her reader and even from reader to reader), in a book whose last section doubles as a ‘private ritual’ space of collective mourning for victims of the Covid-19 pandemic (302). While Godden’s elegy questions the possibility of passing down the personal memory and collective history of traumatic events, it also promotes the literary regeneration and transmission of mourning rituals in a seemingly “deritualised” contemporary British society (Clavandier 2009, 91). It is no coincidence that Godden should offer a humanising “re-vision” (Rich 1979, 35) of Death by replacing the legendary figure of the Grim Reaper with an elderly black beggar woman, a “rubbish collector” who “collect[s] spirits up and carr[ies] burdens away” (152). In this unlikely friendship story, ghost-writing is akin to being “the listener, the messenger, the passenger” (74): the book revives the tradition of oral tales by turning transmission into an act of care. This paper thus aims to investigate the paradoxical ways in which the passing down of Death’s tales forms a chain of consolation for characters and readers alike.