Customer Reviews

Beyond Black

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I'm a big Mantel fan. I loved "An Experiment in Love," "Fludd," and "A Change of Climate." Mantel's gorgeous prose style even carried me most of the way through "A Place of Greater Safety--" her gigantic novel about the French revolution. And so of course I rushed out to buy "Beyond Black" as soon as I saw it reviewed.

As a novelist, Mantel has never been one to tip her hand. She keeps us guessing, for example about the true identity of the title character in "Fludd," and we never know how the protaganist of "An Experiment in Love" gets over her anorexia. When it comes to characterization Mantel shows rather than tells; she relies on evocative imagery, rather than on psychobabble, to shed light on the motivation of her characters. As Margaret Atwood says in her review of "An Experiment in Love," it is "what you don't know" that haunts you after you've finished one of Mantel's novels.

But I think that Mantel goes too far off in this direction in "Beyond Black." She simply doesn't tell the reader enough to make the story hang together. Her background characters-- Alison's psychic colleagues, Colette's ex-husband, even the spectral Morris-- are caricatures. And the two protagonists are incomprehensible. We never really understand what draws Colette to the "psychic business" in the first place, given that she spends most of the novel being so skeptical. And we never really understand what it's like to be Allison, to have the dead tormenting you all the time. The flashbacks to Allison's past are ghastly and beautiful, but the "present tense" narrative is mostly taken up by innane dialogue that never seems to go anywhere.

Both of the reviews I read of this book-- in the New York Times and the Washington Post-- are very favorable, so I'm wondering if I'm missing something. Did anybody see anything in this novel that I didn't?

Well, I must say, after laughing my way through Mary Roach's wonderful "Spook," a non-fiction expose of early 20th century spiritualism, I was ready to give Hilary Mantel a try. I was certainly not disappointed. Mary Roach had me in stitches over cheesecloth nasal packing presenting itself as "ectoplasm." Mantel, on the other hand, gave me a spiritualist one could love, an overweight, insecure and tender-hearted medium who puts up with both worldly and supernatural nastiness until her own good deed frees her.

A recent New Yorker article on Mantel gave me the idea that she might have something to tell me, and I was happily right. I was already prepared for the eerie and inexplicable; Mary Roach, however, prepared me for
mediums fortified with cooking sherry and booking rooms in pubs and bowling alleys. As I was completely new to Mantel, I found myself immersed in her unique mix of humor and ugliness. I was just delighted when a grey sock turned up in Colette's dryer (a very ominous sign), and when Al found her new spirit guides to be two little old ladies who required padded drawers on outings.

I'll read Mantel again, that's a certainty. In the meantime, it's four stars for "Beyond Black"...and an unconditional plug for Mary Roach's "Spook," while we're at it!

Like other reviewers, I wanted to give this book more than three stars. Mantel is a writer whom I very much admire and the idea of this book seized my imagination before I even started to read.

The book opens wonderfully, and I was fully engaged within a few pages. The characters are well-drawn. While not sympathetic, Allison and Colette are very real. Mantel engages her trademark blend of sympathy and savagery while describing these women and their damaged lives.

The real struggle with the book comes midway through the story. As though she painted herself into a corner, the trope of revelation through the conversations with Morris falls flat and becomes repetitive. I got and even respect the parody of the "troubled childhood gradually revealing itself" that Mantel uses. It's very funny, and the humor resonates with the real grief of broken lives. This said, the joke goes on for far too long, and by the end of the book I was simply glad that it was over. 100 pages less would have done a lot to tighten the book and correct most of the problems that I had with the build up of the story.

There are some truly brilliant bits sprinkled throughout the book. Humor and pathos and the claustrophobia of life around the highways are the gems of the novel. I wish that they could have been more consistent, or more densely placed.

Fans of Mantel should read it. Be aware that it is not her best work. Particularly given the glowing reviews, it is a bit of a disappointment. Probably obvious if you know anything about Mantel as a writer, but this isn't a novel suitable for younger readers. Much of the material is extremely disturbing and often quite graphic.

One of the primary purposes of fiction is to delve into the thoughts and minds of other people, areas which we don't usually have access to. With a commanding and masterful authority, what Mantel does in this novel is present a character named Alison who is a psychic and can effectively take on the traditional role of the writer: moving in and out of other characters' thoughts, delving into their pasts and oftentimes uncovering things about their lives which the characters themselves aren`t even aware of. Tragically for Alison, her own past is what remains illusive and opaque. Her father is unknown as her mother who used to work as a prostitute can't even be bothered to speculate about his identity. She bears a number of disfiguring, deep scars on her legs, but can't recall what she did to deserve being given them. She's plagued by a spiritual guide who is incredibly crass and low-minded. Although she's a very sensitive and tender individual, she's very strong. She must necessarily develop a slightly self-mocking public persona in order to carry out her work giving psychic readings to a mass audience. Beyond Black charts the painful process Alison must undergo to develop a sense of self worth and a feeling that she is someone who deserves happiness.

Mantel has a magnificent talent for writing about the indignation people feel when trapped within systems which treat them impersonally. She's written about this when describing her experiences in hospital within her insightful memoir Giving up the Ghost. In one scene of Beyond Black, Alison and her business partner Colette buy a new house. The anguish of dealing with an estate agent who assumes they are lesbians and treats them with a perfunctory formality is expertly described. There is also a very funny scene when Alison goes to the doctor. Ironically, because of her psychic ability, she's able to diagnose the doctor's ailments better than he is able to assess her condition. These scenes painfully evoke the dilemmas we face in modern society when caught within a capitalist system which impersonally deals with customers rather than individuals.

In this richly detailed book, Mantel is more concerned with the intricate psychology of her characters and the muddled, bizarre experiences of psychics rather than with constructing a thrilling plot. There is a complicated mystery at work. But those seeking a more traditional spook story may be disappointed. Mantel doesn't go for cheap horrors by writing about things going bump in the night or illusive shrouded figures spied in the distance. The real horrors she explores are the mundane concerns which clutter our daily lives and the possibility that these trivial obsessions can continue after death. Rather than presenting the after-life as one of two extremes: blissful paradise or tortured damnation, she offers the terrifying possibility that existential anxiety might plague us even after death. Hilariously, Mantel at one point likens this vague longing and unsettling condition to waiting in line at the National Health Service. This is almost an extension of an idea Sartre presented in his play No Exit. If Hell is other people, then in Mantel's world we will be complaining, nagging, annoying and infuriating each other for eternity - a horrific thought indeed.

I am a Mantel fan, and I have enjoyed her books in the past. Saying that, Beyond Black was a big disappointment for me.

Mantel is a wonderful writer, and her clever prose is apparent in this book. It's the plot and characterization that I found so troublesome, and this was not a page-turner at all for me.

Summary, no spoilers:

Alison is a very sweet, and very obese psychic. She meets Colette, who is in the audience at a show where Alison is doing readings.

Colette is a young woman who is described as very nondescript...kind of beige. She has few friends, and marries a cold and equally nondescript husband. She seems devoid of much passion or personality, at least when we first meet her. She was the most problematic character for me, and she seemed the most incomplete.

Alison hires Colette to be her assistant, and help with her business affairs. It's never really clear why Colette is chosen, and it's also never clear why Alison keeps Colette, who is verbally and emotionally abusive to Alison under the guise of caring and concern. (She constantly calls her "fat".) I understood that Alison had her need for Colette, but I never felt that was enough to explain her keeping her on, especially towards the end.

Alison is a very gifted "Sensitive", and she is often visited by a horrible ghost named Morris, who unfortunately is her "spirit guide". Alison is often plagued by nightmares, and by visitations from a group of fiendish men, whom we understand Alison may have known in her youth. Her life is full of horrors, and as the book progresses it starts spiraling out of control.

Without giving anything away, we come to understand that Alison has had an unbearably horrible childhood, and those traumas have obviously impacted her present world.

Part of my problem with this book may be my own: I am not particularly wild about stories involving psychics and spirits, but I have enjoyed such books in the past.

The real problem with this book, for me, was that the characters and plot seemed so incomplete. I felt like this was a rough draft of part of a novel, rather than a completed work. And there were *endless* boring and tedious paragraphs consisting of the ramblings of the various ghosts, and fellow Sensitives.

I really wish I could give this book more than 3 stars, because there are some well written passages, and Mantel is a gifted writer. But this one just didn't work, and it was really an effort to make myself finish.

As far as a choice for a book club, I will say there are things to discuss. And there are things deliberately left ambiguous, which I thought was a nice touch.

Too bad this couldn't have been pulled together into a more cohesive and entertaining book. The first 100 pages were pretty good and I was hopeful, but it just went downhill quickly after that.

It is not often that I cannot finish a novel once I start it, and initially I found the world of the fringe-town psychic Alison Hart to be quite fascinating. Despite the squalor of her background and setting, Alison appears to have genuine gifts, together with a canny sense of what her public wants, and her relationship with her assistant, the much better-educated Colette, is portrayed with a good deal of sensitivity. There are also moments of welcome humor, quite wickedly so in the chapter surrounding the death of Princess Di.

But after reading to well beyond the half-way point, I realized that there was nothing to make me continue; I see from other reviews that I am not alone in this. The book lacks narrative thrust -- or rather its development depends too much on the various ghost characters that invade Alison's space. And here I think Mantel fails by treating these low-lifes in largely comic terms (Morris, her spirit guide, for example, is described as a "circus clown"), lower-class English types which seem to belong more to popular TV than to life. There are hints of trauma and abuse in Alison's childhood, and clearly the ghosts will turn out to have been connected to it. But I find it impossible to take such one-dimensional cartoons seriously as a way into the psyche of a character who has been established so clearly in the full three dimensions -- or even in four.

Alison is a reader, a genuine psychic who, exhausted by the rigors of her demanding profession, often ignores the business side of her trade. Thus, she is pleased when she is approached by the prissy and officious Colette, who recently ended both her employment and her marriage. Sensing they can be of aid to each other, Alison invites Colette to take over her business affairs; this Colette does, at first slowly, then with more gusto, arriving at the point where she's even planning the overweight Alison's daily menus. Friendship and respect degenerate into conflict and disdain.

Although the supernatural plays an important part in this book-for instance, Alison's greasy spirit guide, the loathsome Morris, is introduced within the book's opening pages--Mantel seems more interested in capturing the complexities of the relationship between the two women, chronicling the ups and downs of their relationship. Alison and Colette are initially good for each other, but the very aspects of their personalities that allow for this are also the ultimate cause of their estrangement. Mantel subtly exposes these strengths and weaknesses, providing fascinating glimpses into the complex psyches of her two damaged protagonists.

Mantel loves to play the mundane off the fantastic. For instance, Alison foretells Princess Diana's death, but most of the distress she feels is not over the impending death, but because of the increased work load that the event will bring her. Equally fascinating is the work a day world of sensitives/readers Mantel so realistically portrays; as much performers as they are gifted, their experience plays almost as important a part in their presentations as do their psychic talents. At times, it's difficult to tell whether Alison is relying on tradecraft or supernatural gifts to work her audiences; readers get the feeling that even Alison doesn't always know. But, rest assured, Alison's gifts, born of a great trauma which Mantel thoroughly explores, are genuine.

Dark, touching and amusing, Beyond Black combines a compelling character study with an intense focus on social mores and attitudes. Reminiscent in many ways of Christopher Priest's 1995 masterpiece The Prestige, the novel brings this small world to vivid life, transporting readers to a strange, exotic, landscape where the past exerts a powerful hold over the present, emotionally, psychically and physically.

Hilary Mantel is a writer's writer. She takes breathtaking leaps in her work, crafts sentences that make your head spin, is seeringly funny, and achieves a kind of honesty that is both slant and dead on. Toward the last third of this novel, I slowed down and read something else for a while in order to postpone the end.

I'm a certified tarot master, so it was the tarot cards on the cover of "Beyond Black" that first caught my eye. As I read the book, I was pleasantly surprised at how well Hilary Mantel dealt with the cards ... if you'll excuse the pun. This is a version of a review I posted on my tarot website:

Psychic mediums like John Edwards, Sylvia Brown, and James van Praagh have rocketed to fame in the United States, and apparently the phenomenon is well-known in the United Kingdom, too.

Beyond Black explores the backstage world of psychic shows and psychic fairs, through an intimate look at the lives of an English psychic named Alison Hart - a "sensitive," in her own words - and her business manager, Colette.

While Alison is primarily a psychic, she also reads tarot cards ... and she reads them well. In fact, the author clearly understands the cards, and her descriptions are more than simply accurate: they are poetic. Take this passage, for example, as Alison waits for a client at a psychic fair:

"Her tarot cards, unused so far today, sat at her right hand, burning through their wrap of scarlet satin: priestess, lover, and fool. She had never touched them with a hand that was soiled, or opened them to the air without opening her heart."

Colette, a divorced secretary, turns out to be a remarkably effective partner in Alison's business. Before Alison goes on stage in little towns across the English countryside, Alison checks sound and light, and gauges the mood of the crowd. She runs a microphone to "contacts" in the audience. She develops Alison's advertising campaign, schedules her private readings, and fights for every tax break Alison can get. She even stays up late, tea and sandwiches at hand, to help Alison ride the wave of mania that follows her public performances.

While the novel is set against the backdrop of the psychic world, Beyond Black is really a study of friendship - in this case, a strained and troubled friendship. Alison needs Colette's help at all hours of the night and day, so they live together. Before long, Colette has managed Alison's affairs so well that the two are able to afford a new home in an rural subdivision. Their neighbors naturally assume that the two are lesbians; neither one attempts to correct that impression. In fact, for their own privacy, neither will even say what they do for a living. Collette tells some of the neighbors that Alison is a forecaster; for years, Alison tries to understand why those neighbors tease and question her about the weather.

A new home was important to Alison, who is routinely tormented by the ghosts and spirits that haunt every old building and old neighborhood she enters. When she and Colette travel, they even try to stay in new hotels, to avoid the suicides in the stairwells, the sobbing chambermaids in the bathrooms, and the murder victims that lay forever in their beds.

Sadly, there is a decided difference between the peaceful afterlife that Alison describes to her clients, and the spirit world she experiences for herself. While Alison offers platitudes and warm greetings to those in her audience, she is almost constantly accompanied by an array of the dysfunctional departed from her own past. Her spirit guide, Morris Warren, is a bow-legged dwarf with a foul mouth and a propensity for exposing himself. Other ghosts that haunt her include Mrs. McGibbit, the motherly old lady who watched her while her own mother, a prostitute, abused and neglected her, as well as Keith Capstick, who pulled a vicious fighting dog off Alison when she was just a child.

Alison also gets fairly regular visits from members of the royal family - including Princess Diana, whose death she sees psychically, and who later visits, press clippings pinned to her wedding gown, weeping for the sons whose names she can no longer remember.

The constant interruptions from the spirit world put a tremendous strain on Alison and Colette's friendship. While Colette seems to understand Alison's mood swings, she is driven almost to distraction by Alison's poor eating habits. The psychic is huge: the author describes her as a size 26, "a woman who seemed to fill a room, even when she wasn't in it. She was of an unfeasible size, with plump creamy shoulders, rounded calves, thighs and hips that overflowed her chair ... When you came into a room she'd left - her bedroom, her hotel room, her dressing room backstage - you felt her as a presence, a trail."

Meanwhile, Colette struggles with the fact that she seems to leave no trace. Perfume doesn't last on her skin. She barely sweats. Her feet don't indent the carpet. "It's as if you wipe out the signs of yourself as you go," Alison remarks. "Like a robot housekeeper. You polish your own fingerprints away."

One of the highlights of the novel are the outtakes from Colette's tape-recorded interviews with Alison - tapes that Colette intends to turn into a book. Unfortunately, the recordings are usually indecipherable, because the sound of high-pitched whining, and buzzing, and shouting from the spirit world tends to drown out Alison's answers. Even so, we see snippets of conversation between the two, and get valuable insights into Alison's past and her gifts as a psychic.

The most tantalizing revelations involve the mentions of abuse Alison has suffered - something, it seems, that she has in common with other psychics in her field. Colette asks Alison if she has ever suffered a serious blow to the head. "Of course," Alison replies. "Haven't you?"

It is, frankly, just enough to make the reader wonder if Alison and her associates are truly psychic, or simply mentally ill. It's also an exchange that's perfectly suited to the overall theme of the book - a sort of dark humor that truly goes "beyond black."

The novel isn't always an easy read. A lot of the story is revealed through the jumbled imagery and symbolism that seem to be the hallmarks of a psychic reading. But all in all, Beyond Black is a darkly humorous book that treats the subjects of psychic ability and friendship with the respect they deserve.

I have read a number of books by Mantel and admire her writing a great deal. She also writes wonderful book reviews for the London Review of Books. However I put Beyond Black down somewhere before the middle. While the unpleasant characters are portrayed with skill and and some sympathy, they remained essentially uninteresting -- small town psychics with small town ideas. The death of Princess Di thrown in didn't help the mix. I wanted something a little deeper or more exciting to wrap my mind around. However I think it is well worth trying Mantel's other books -- she is in general a skilled and fascinating writer.