Orphic Resonances of Love and Loss in David Almond’s "A Song for Ella Grey"
Orphic Resonances of Love and Loss in David Almond’s "A Song for Ella Grey"

Author(s): Owen Hodkinson
Subject(s): Pre-WW I & WW I (1900 -1919), Interwar Period (1920 - 1939), WW II and following years (1940 - 1949), Post-War period (1950 - 1989), Transformation Period (1990 - 2010)
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Orpheus; Eurydice; David Almond; A Song for Ella Grey; love; loss; teenagers
Summary/Abstract: David Almond’s "A Song for Ella Grey" (2014) is a thoroughly modern young adult novel, which explores the loves (familial, romantic, friendly, and “complicated”) and the losses of a group of ordinary-seeming seventeen-year-old school pupils in the north of England, by weaving the myth of a returned, young-again Orpheus into their lives. The narrator Claire is the best friend of Ella Grey, who dies unexpectedly after being bitten by adders (Britain’s only venomous snake – but not venomous enough to kill humans) shortly after a makeshift “marriage” to Orpheus conducted on the beach by their friends. Claire and her friends learn much about love and loss through their shared experiences throughout the novel, while their learning about literature at school provides one frame of reference for making their very individual and localised stories (complete with Tyneside dialect as well as scenery) universal. Claire and other characters question the relevance of “ancient” stories to their real lives, thus inviting the reader to pose similar questions. In a metaliterary manner, Claire, as narrator, also problematises the novel’s integration of ancient myths that “have no place” in the modern world, and that cannot be explained in that world’s terms; as a character, she questions whether the events she described could really have taken place, only to dismiss such doubts – but again, the reader is invited to ask the same questions, and to wonder whether it was simply “the madness of being young, the madness of knowing love for the first time”.

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