Mantel, Hilary, Beyond Black, Harper Perennial / HarperCollinsPublishers, London, 2005.
Octavo; paperback, with
illustrated wrappers; 451pp. Somewhat cocked; text block and page edges lightly
toned; minor wear to covers. Very good.
“There are nights when you don’t
want to do it, but you have to do it anyway. Nights when you look down from the
stage and see closed stupid faces. Messages from the dead arrive at random. You
don’t want them and you can’t send them back. The dead won’t be coaxed and they
won’t be coerced. But the public has paid its money and it wants results.”
Before the Booker Prizes, before
the quotes taken out of context, before overnight world-wide instant acclaim,
Hilary Mantel wrote a bunch of other books. Most importantly for me, and any similarly-minded
readers out there, she wrote this
book – Beyond Black – a two-fisted,
nitrous-fuelled, headrush into the Unknown, Beyond the Veil. This is a book for
cover-judgers: what you see is what you get. This book goes – blasts – into some dark, dark places; it
has plenty of humour along the way, teamed up with some withering exposés of
the human condition, but the subject matter and the humour is as black as it
gets – beyond black.
The story revolves around two
partners in the psychic business: Alison, or Al, who comes from impoverished
roots and who has spoken with ghosts ever since she can remember, and lost,
directionless Colette, a ruthlessly efficient business-woman newly cut loose
from her dead-end marriage and her dead-head husband. In seeking purpose and
answers for why her relationship crashed so badly, Colette encounters Al and Al
proposes that she becomes her personal assistant and business partner. Colette
reluctantly agrees; not because she has reservations about the supernatural,
but because she needs to work: one of her previous prognosticators told her
that she would find true love by charting a new direction and cutting loose
from old ways, and by meeting a man at her new job.
The two women cannot be more
dissimilar: Al is hugely obese, a mountain of soft flesh, while Colette is
small, slim and angular – all hard lines and jutting bones. Colette is very
direct, believing that all questions have simple, straightforward answers; Al’s
world is nebulous and inexplicable: nothing is what it seems and she usually
doesn’t have the vocabulary to explain to Colette what is happening. And then,
to make things messy, there’s Morris.
Morris is Al’s spirit guide.
No-one but Al can see him, but he makes his presence known to all. Morris is dead;
an ex-jockey, drunkard, foul-mouthed, lecherous pervert, who – to Al’s great
misfortune – was a mate of all the low-life lawless workmen for whom Al’s mum,
Emmie, was the ‘town bike’. At the age of eight, one of Emmie’s regulars –
“Keef” – brought his fighting dogs to the house and one of them tried to kill
Al: since then she has scars and a peculiar affinity for spectral dogs and
their mournful sense of loss - finding themselves without their owners in the
land of the dead - or still suffering the pain and bewilderment of mistreatment
at the hands of brutal owners. Morris, who acts as a conduit for Al, bringing
the dead to talk through her to their surviving family members, has the nasty
habit of bringing Al’s mum’s dead lovers to stay with him, forcing Al to keep
moving to new houses, free of spectral taint, shaking off the unwanted
unliving.
Colette, as well as organising
and re-vivifying Al’s accounts, marketing and methods of client management,
also decides that Al should produce a book. Consequently, they embark upon some
recorded sessions wherein Colette interviews Al about her past and her working
methods. Chunks of the book are transcripts of these sessions and there are
some brilliant moments of golden dialogue. These trips down memory lane throw
Al into long periods of self-examination: her childhood, filled as it was with the
most horrible mental, emotional and physical abuse, has been mercifully blanked
by her psyche and she remembers most of it as simply an unpleasant haze.
Unfortunately, Colette’s questioning and Morriss’s unwelcome visitors start to
open some messy worm-cans.
Mantel masterfully orchestrates
the mechanics of talking to the dead and the activities of those who facilitate
the process. She has a needle tapped straight into the veins of those who seek
out psychic practitioners for comfort of solace: she mercilessly portrays their
obsessive, compulsive self-abuse and wallowing. As well, she conjures a gallery
of psychic operators – tarot card readers, palmists, druids, tasseomancers – who
are as cynical and money-focussed as any suit-wearing operator from London’s
Golden Mile. However – and here’s where Mantel’s brilliance shows through at its
best – we meet all of these people through Al, whose generosity of spirit and
need to remain “professional” and cater for everyone’s needs, never allows them
to become truly the monsters they could be.
Al tells us that the dead are
petty, self-obsessed and have hang-ups about the most ridiculous things – one
spirit insists that Al pass on a message about the location of a missing
cardigan button; another repeatedly tells her that she’s been looking for her best
friend for over thirty years; Morris spends most of his time with his dick out.
This is the reason, she tells Colette after some persistent questioning, why
they don’t bother explaining what Heaven and Hell and God are like. Sometimes
Al explains, the dead aren’t forthcoming at all; then she has to fall back on
her telepathy to impress her clients. Colette becomes more confused and tries
to spot the difference between ‘Al being a medium’ and ‘Al being telepathic’,
to no real effect.
The matter-of-fact treatment of
the supernatural here is what makes the whole package work. The psychics all
compete for new innovations that will allow them to corner the market – Vedic palmistry
versus Traditional; Vastu instead of Feng Shui – but their squabbling for
buzz-words is merely the gloss on top of the given that is the communication
with those “passed over”. At one “psychic fayre” on the weekend of Princess
Diana’s funeral, they warily circle each other each trying to be the first to
receive a communication from HRH, but trying not to make it look opportunistic.
Ironically, Al is the only one who does
get an audience, but it happens in her hotel room where no-one except Colette
(who doesn’t understand what’s happening) is there to see it.
Ultimately, what drives Al (with Colette,
stumbling briskly in her wake) is the knowledge of What Comes Next, and her
desperate fear to avoid it, just as she tried to avoid the casual, brutal
realities of her childhood. In essence, Al becomes a dweller on the
hinterlands, neither here nor there, pacifying the living and trying to keep
the dead under control. As you read on, your realisation of the subtleties (and
grotesqueries) of her position become terrifying clear.
It’s not only the source material
that makes this a great read; it’s also the consummate writing that it showcases.
Mantel has a gimlet eye and pins down the bleak urban landscapes which our two
heroines tear through with uncanny and beautiful accuracy. Try this:
“A sea-green sky: lamps blossoming
white. This is marginal land: fields of strung wire, of treadless tyres in
ditches, fridges dead on their backs, and starving ponies cropping the mud. It
is a landscape running with outcasts and escapees, with Afghans, Turks and
Kurds: with scapegoats, scarred with bottle and burn marks, limping from the
cities with broken ribs. The life forms here are rejects, or anomalies: the
cats tipped from speeding cars, and the Heathrow sheep, their fleece clotted
with the stench of aviation fuel.”
In a world where so much of what
gets published is just bad writing that should never have made it to the page,
this is a breath of fresh air. Or rather, a great, gulping, lung-filling sense
of relief that there is a master at work out there in the field.
And of course, this gets the full
five Tentacled Horrors from me, along with a stern injunction to find it and
read it!
