Hillary Mantel, Beyond Black

A ghost story, unlike, I’d wager, any ghost story you’ve encountered before, Beyond Black is a study of two clashing personality types. Alison, Al, is a “sensitive” who had acquired, reluctantly, a spirit guide, an ugly dwarf ghost, at a very young age and has been stuck with him ever since. Both abetted by and in addition to Morris’s manipulations, numbers of those “who had passed” presented themselves to Al, informing her, complaining to her of the past and sometimes of the present. Finally Al concluded, since she wasn’t suited (what with distraction and mischievous practical jokes by Morris) for any conventional employment to become a professional revealer of the beyond to paying audiences. She was a natural, quickly skilled in working audiences, assuaging both coarse and disbelieving humor and grumbling dissatisfaction at what she told them.

Unsurprisingly she, Colette, her spirit guide, and a few “sensitive” friends elect to go to Princess Di’s funeral, half expecting that the dead princess will join them:

“S’funny,” Colette said. “It’s only a fortnight ago, those pictures of her in the boat with Dodi, in her bikini. And we were all saying, what a slapper.”

Al opened the glove box and ferreted out a chocolate biscuit.

“That is the emergency Kit-Kat,” Colette protested.

“This is an emergency. I couldn’t eat my breakfast.” She ate the chocolate morosely, finger by finger. “If Gavin had been Prince of Wales,” she said, “do you think you’d have tried harder in your marriage?”

“Definitely."

Colette’s eyes were on the road; in the passenger seat Alison twisted over her shoulder to look at Morris in the back, kicking his short legs and singing a medley of patriotic songs. As they passed beneath a bridge policemen’s faces peered down at them, pink sweating ovals above the sick glow of high-visibility jackets. Stubble-headed boys—the type who, in normal times, heave a concrete block through your windscreen—now jabbed the mild air with bunches of carnations. A ragged bedsheet, grey-white drifted down into their view. It was scrawled in crimson capitals, as if in virgin’s blood: DIANA, QUEEN OF OUR HEARTS.

Good at ghosting, she was no business woman. Her accounts were in disarray, her taxes unpaid, her income barely matched her outflow, with no care directed toward retirement and hard times. Into this breech comes Colette, fast with numbers, organized to the “T,” practical but willing to take Allison’s word for the “people” she could see though Colette couldn’t. Colette’s marriage to the grumpy, indifferent Gavin was tottering toward separation, so the two women joined forces in business and living arrangements, Colette becoming Allison’s organizer, gofer, and occasional foot massager so effectively that Allison quickly moved from insolvency to nicely fixed.

But of course their personality differences quickly had them stepping on each other’s toes. Al’s fatness (she was amazingly obese) became more and more repugnant to Colette, who was skinny and stringy in body and hair.

A bitter humor arises from the their platonic relationship’s resemblance to many marriages in its disintegrating spin. And a certain anthropological interest emerges from the novel’s many, many glimpses into the professional experiences of British psychics. Hilary Mantel also shows her readers the underbelly of English lower-class life, which is as sordid and painful as the underbelly of its royals but lacking in their accoutrements.

Mantell’s skills in dialogue and dialect are part of the novel’s rewards. Beyond Black is almost a must reading for writers in its demonstration of the necessity of good structure. Its deficiency of a well designed plot line gives Mantell’s events the feel of standing waves, going up and down but not getting anywhere. Her surprises are too foreseeable to surprise; her resolution lacks satisfaction.

Still its unusual subject matter is likely to hold your interest, but bail out when the impulse strikes because, while it doesn’t get less interesting, it never gets more interesting.