It’s a fact universally acknowledged that people called Hilary must be the best at everything. Especially if it’s spelled with one ‘L’. And true to form, Ms Mantel won the Booker Prize in October 2009 with Wolf Hall, a book I really want to read but it’s about the size of a large-print hardbacked Bible and costs a massive £20 in Waterstones. So I’m going to review Beyond Black instead which I found in a charity shop for £1.50. High five!
Primarily a ghost story, Hilary Mantel’s novel is also a book about women. The story revolves around women’s lives, the trials, tribulations, loss, indignities and marginalisation that lead them to seek answers in psychic fairs and tarot cards, and in the attentions of Alison, a psychic who passes on otherworldly messages to the hordes who come to see her in dingy pubs and community halls just off the M25.
She’s not a fake, crook or charlatan, but nevertheless she elides and obscures the truth because the true nature of the afterlife isn’t the happy, peaceful realm that people imagine. Yes, there are harmless old lady ghosts obsessed with missing buttons, and confused queues of spectral, doddery relatives. But there are also the fiends.
Her spirit guide is one of them, a lowly, grotesque and unhygienic spook named Morris who plagues Alison’s every moment. Her live-in ‘human’ guide isn’t much better, a ruthlessly efficient woman named Collete who is two-thirds bully, one-third matter-of-fact divorcee forging a new life as Alison’s live-in manager (“I’m not a lesbian”, she frequently asserts to Gavin, her ex).
Together they roam the South of England, which in Mantel’s novel is a wasteland: a withered landscape of oozing, polluted substances and toxic dumps, of traffic and service stations, truck stops and burger vans. A perfect home for the fiends, the ghosts of the evil men who took her childhood and haunt her now, wriggling out of the woodwork like the mutated white worms infesting her neighbour’s garden.
Aitkenside, Pikey Pete, Keith Capstick and the shadowy, dreaded Nick: dog fighters, abusers, criminals and murderers in life morphed into ungainly demons in death, almost cartoonish in their lowbrow wickedness- more horror-show gargoyle than otherworldly spook. They seem almost amusing at times, but the humour of their unghostly earthiness and appetites gradually pales as Al gradually remembers the details of her past.
Bleak? Yes, but Mantel lightens the mood by dwelling on the mundane details of life, of trips to buy sheds, the psychic fairs, hen parties and Al’s bland neighbours and their squalling children. And mirroring this is the blandness of death: the old lady looking for her friend- even the fiends’ desire for pies and racing. She layers light, deft touches of humour on even the harshest of Al’s recollections until the overall effect is one of deep and resonant contemplation. Beyond Black, indeed.
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