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.
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Top reviews from other countries
Little Bookness Lane
Brilliantly done.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 1, 2024
Philippa S. Beale
a parable of contemporary life
Reviewed in France on May 25, 2014
