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Summary
Summary
Hailed as a "writer of subtlety and depth," Hilary Mantel turns her dark genius on the world of psychics in this smart, unsettling novel (Joyce Carol Oates)
A paragon of efficiency, Colette took the next natural step after finishing secretarial school by marrying a man who would do just fine. After a sobering, do-it-yourself divorce, Colette is at a loss for what to do next. Convinced that she is due an out-of-hand, life-affirming revelation, she strays into the realm of psychics and clairvoyants, hungry for a whisper to set her off in the right direction. At a psychic fair in Windsor she meets the charismatic Alison.
Alison, the daughter of a prostitute, beleaguered during her childhood by the pressures of her connection to the spiritual world, lives in a different kind of solitude. She cannot escape the dead who speak to her, least of all the constant presence of Morris, her low-life spiritual guide. An expansive presence onstage, Alison at once feels her bond with Colette, inviting her to join her on the road as her personal assistant and companion.
Troubles spiral out of control when the pair moves to a suburban wasteland in what was once the English countryside and take up with a spirit guide and his drowned therapist. It is not long before Alison's connection to the place beyond black threatens to uproot their lives forever. This is Hilary Mantel at her finest- insightful, darkly comic, unorthodox, and thrilling to read.
Author Notes
Hilary Mantel was born in Glossop, Derbyshire, England on July 6, 1952. She studied law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University. She worked as a social worker in Botswana for five years, followed by four years in Saudi Arabia. She returned to Britain in the mid-1980s. In 1987 she was awarded the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for an article about Jeddah. She worked as a film critic for The Spectator from 1987 to 1991.
She has written numerous books including Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, A Place of Greater Safety, A Change of Climate, The Giant, O'Brien, Giving up the Ghost: A Memoir, and Beyond Black. She made The New York Times Best Seller List with her title The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. She has won several awards for her work including the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, the Cheltenham Prize and the Southern Arts Literature Prize for Fludd; the 1996 Hawthornden Prize for An Experiment in Love, the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Wolf Hall, and the 2012 Man Booker Prize for Bring up the Bodies. Book three of the Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, was named the best book of 2020 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, The Guardian, and others. Hilary Mantel died on September 22, 2022 from complications of a stroke. She was 70.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Instead of celebrating the mystical side of "sensitives," the people who travel England's contemporary psychic "fayre" circuit, Mantel (A Change of Climate, etc.) concentrates on the potential banality of spiritualism in her latest novel, a no-nonsense exploration of the world of public and private clairvoyance. Colette is a down-on-her-luck event planner fresh from a divorce when she attends a two-day Psychic Extravaganza, her "introduction to the metaphorical side of life." There, Alison, a true clairvoyant, "reads" Colette, sees her need for a new life-as well as her potential-and hires her as a Girl Friday. As Colette's responsibilities grow, and the line between the professional and the personal blurs, Colette takes over Alison's marketing, builds her Web site, plans for a book and buys a house with her. Colette also serves as a sort of buffer between Alison and the multitude of spirits who beleaguer her. (Alison's spirit guide, Morris, "a little bouncing circus clown," proves especially troublesome.) Mantel's portraits of the two leading characters as well as those of the supporting cast-both on and off this mortal coil-are sharply drawn. This witty, matter-of-fact look at the psychic milieu reveals a supernatural world that can be as mundane as the world of carpet salesmen and shopkeepers. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Fans of Mantel's 2003 memoir, Giving Up the Ghost 0 (2003), will recognize aspects of the author in the sympathetic heroine of her tenth book, a darkly funny novel about the odd relationships formed among the living and the dead. Alison Hart, nearing 40, overweight and happily single, is a spiritual seer by trade. She reads palms and tarot cards; in villages throughout England, she performs in front of packed crowds, her stage act a combination of fortune-telling and "communications" with the other side. In an age of celebrity deaths and terrorist attacks, Alison's authentic spiritual gifts are highly prized, but her personal life is in shambles, physically, emotionally, and financially. Help arrives in the form of Colette, a recently divorced, no-nonsense professional, who sees Alison's predicament as an opportunity to reinvent both women's lives. Obstacles to Colette's ambitious plans include nosy neighbors, competing psychics, even adversaries from beyond--especially a gang of menacing thugs from Alison's childhood. A contemporary ghost story told with humor and heart, this novel is sure to conjure up new readers for Mantel. --James Klise Copyright 2005 Booklist
Guardian Review
Alison, a professional medium, relies on her psychological acumen: "She could see straight through the living, to their ambitions and secret sorrows." She is good enough at guessing her way into the heads of her "punters" to fill the civic buildings and conference rooms where she does her act. The narrative drily reports: "Dead people talked to her, and she talked back." It could almost be irony, yet Mantel gives form to Alison's visions. At the beginning of the novel, in her dressing-room before a performance, Alison is asking her sidekick Colette to fetch her a drink. "She almost said, look out, Colette, don't tread on Morris." Whoever Morris is, he is apparently sitting on the floor. "When Colette stepped back she trampled straight over him . . . As usual she didn't notice. But Morris did. 'Fucking stuck-up cow,' he said, as Colette went out." Morris, we gradually realise, is Alison's mocking tutelary spirit, Colette's rival from the other side of the grave. Colette cannot see or hear him, though she does not doubt his existence. He is one of Alison's "fiends", a mock-horror word drolly expressing Alison's acceptance that, as a "sensitive", she is liable to this teasing by malign ghosts. The arrangement of narrative and dialogue refuses to allow the reader to take the "fiends" as just in Alison's head. Morris has his own sour and horrible voice. Passages of indirect speech make it sound as if he is as much a character as any of the living. "Truth was, he longed for a friend; it was no life, holed up with a bunch of women." Mantel gives us dramatic dialogues between him and the other "dead" spirits of the men who haunted the home of Alison's prostitute mother when she was young. Maybe it is all in Alison's head, but there it is, coming nastily alive on the page. The afterlife is hardly new to literature. The afterlife in this novel is familiar from pagan narrative. Souls are not damned or saved. Rather, life is continued by other means. Mrs Etchells, the medium who dies onstage at a steakhouse called the Fig & Pheasant, returns to tell Alison that life after death is "like Aldershot". A familiar joke, twisted, for Aldershot is where Alison endured her terrible childhood, tortured, neglected, sold for sex by her mother. "'There's your mum reeling down the road with a squaddie on her arm, and they're heading for hers to do the unmentionable'." Some of the dead are maliciously inclined to persevere with the torments they liked to inflict when they were still "earthside". The dead are like the living. "You don't get a personality transplant when you're dead. You don't suddenly get a degree in philosophy," Alison explains to Colette. Mantel's narrative credits her two main characters' viewpoints, Colette's as well as Alison's. "Quick, shallow and literal", as Mantel puts it, Colette has a purchase on others' self-deceptions that makes her, if not exactly likeable, then valuable to the reader. How irresistibly does she bargain and bully. How accurately does she sum up the prejudices of those she meets. Alison asks if the neighbours on their new-build private estate think that they are lesbians. "'I expect so.' Colette added, 'I hope it spoils their enjoyment of their property.'" The creation of Colette brilliantly demonstrates that subtle characterisation requires no "sympathy". Sympathy is not really what the sharp-eyed Colette is prepared for. When she discovers that her ex-husband Gavin is miserable and helpless without her, Mantel mordantly notices this. "She looked at him and her heart was touched: where her heart would be." There is also another viewpoint in the novel, conveyed to us by an impersonal narrative voice. It opens the book on the M25, the orbital zone where Alison and Colette ply their trade. "This is marginal land: fields of strung wire, of treadless tyres in ditches, fridges dead on their backs, and starving ponies cropping the mud." This is an England of jerry-built "executive" homes named after famous admirals (Alison and Colette buy a Collingwood), "staring out over low hills of compacted London waste". It is bitterly funny about the blasted landscapes, the theme pubs, the estate agents, the improbable food (nachos in Virginia Water, Belgian buns in Broxbourne) that the two women encounter. It sounds almost like a state-of-the-nation novel. Except that it is all too dark to be analysis. By the end it seems apocalyptic, out there on the motorway circling London. "There are terrorists in the ditches, knives clenched between their teeth . . . there are fanatics brewing bombs on brownfield sites." Strange things are happening in underground laboratories; "there are cannibal moo-cows and toxic bunnikins". Alison escapes her demons, but the satirical narrative has taken on its own, accommodated to a country where "fiends have melted into the soil". John Mullan is professor of English at University College London. Join him and Hilary Mantel on Wednesday January 25 at the Newsroom, 60 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3GA. To book call 020 7886 9281 or email book.club@guardian.co.uk Caption: article-Bookclub21.1 Morris, we gradually realise, is [Alison]'s mocking tutelary spirit, [Colette]'s rival from the other side of the grave. Colette cannot see or hear him, though she does not doubt his existence. He is one of Alison's "fiends", a mock-horror word drolly expressing Alison's acceptance that, as a "sensitive", she is liable to this teasing by malign ghosts. The arrangement of narrative and dialogue refuses to allow the reader to take the "fiends" as just in Alison's head. Morris has his own sour and horrible voice. Passages of indirect speech make it sound as if he is as much a character as any of the living. "Truth was, he longed for a friend; it was no life, holed up with a bunch of women." Mantel gives us dramatic dialogues between him and the other "dead" spirits of the men who haunted the home of Alison's prostitute mother when she was young. Maybe it is all in Alison's head, but there it is, coming nastily alive on the page. - John Mullan.
Kirkus Review
Unpleasant and meddling dead people litter the landscape around a very sweet medium whose past would frighten anyone to death. The mark of a great novelist may be the ability to take you where you truly don't want to go. If so, Mantel (Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir, 2003; Fludd, 2000, etc.) is the real goods. Who, without some sort of artistic seduction, would willingly go into the mind of an obese English psychic whose tortured childhood makes the worst of Dickens look like a cakewalk? Mantel's lure into this dark trip is the carefully won charm of psychic Alison "Al" Hart, a sunny-tempered "sensitive" who has had to tolerate the constant presence underfoot of Morris, her repulsive spirit guide. Morris, who is linked to Al's evil childhood surroundings, hangs around her dressing room, invisible to the "insensitive" as Alison works the crummy theaters and meeting halls where she and her colleagues bring whitewashed glimpses of the postmortem other side (nobody wnts to hear how confused and unhappy the dead really are) to England's lower middle classes. In the years since the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet brought unimagined looniness onto the world scene, Al has benefited from the no-nonsense assistance of Colette, an erstwhile events manager in flight from a loveless marriage. Colette's keen business sense has put Al's finances in such order that there is enough money for the odd couple to buy the largest model of house in a new subdivision that is so devoid of charm or past that Morris, very much a city lad when he was alive, finally leaves the two women alone for a period of peace. Relative peace. Alison is never without reminders of not just her special abilities but of the incidents in her childhood that scarred her brutally, inside and out. Voices of the dead turn up on Al's taped memoirs, and then her old torturers turn up in the subdivision, following orders from Lucifer. Superbly odd, but still superb. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The 1997 death of Princess Diana and the 9/11 attacks form the backdrop of this unusual tale by Mantel (Giving Up the Ghost). Alison, a medium, tours her native England, rousing the departed and conveying their messages to audiences in search of spiritual solace. Meanwhile, the author tackles child abuse, female friendship, racial dynamics, eating disorders, environmental destruction, and sexuality, reminding readers that even those close to the spirit world have to contend with contemporary social issues. While readers unschooled in the wiles of psychic phenomenon will likely find parts of this novel tedious, Alison and her intrepid business partner, Colette, are so interestingly quirky that even when the novel veers into New Age babble it retains some appeal. Spirit guides mingle with shysters, and Tarot card readers intersect with crystal gazers, as Alison and Colette deftly navigate the British suburbs. Recommended for all libraries with occult and spirituality collections.-Eleanor J. Bader, Brooklyn, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Beyond Black one Travelling: the dank oily days after Christmas. The motorway, its wastes looping London: the margin's scrub grass flaring orange in the lights, and the leaves of the poisoned shrubs striped yellow-green like a cantaloupe melon. Four o'clock: light sinking over the orbital road. Teatime in Enfield, night falling on Potter's Bar. 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. 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. Beside her, in profile against the fogged window, the driver's face is set. In the back seat, something dead stirs, and begins to grunt and breathe. The car flees across the junctions, and the space the road encloses is the space insideher: the arena of combat, the wasteland, the place of civil strife behind her ribs. A heart beats, taillights wink. Dim lights shine from tower blocks, from passing helicopters, from fixed stars. Night closes in on the perjured ministers and burnt-out pedophiles, on the unloved viaducts and graffitied bridges, on ditches beneath mouldering hedgerows and railings never warmed by human touch. Night and winter: but in the rotten nests and empty setts, she can feel the signs of growth, intimations of spring. This is the time of Le Pendu, the Hanged Man, swinging by his foot from the living tree. It is a time of suspension, of hesitation, of the indrawn breath. It is a time to let go of expectation, yet not abandon hope; to anticipate the turn of the Wheel of Fortune. This is our life and we have to lead it. Think of the alternative. A static cloud bank, like an ink smudge. Darkening air. It's no good asking me whether I'd choose to be like this, because I've never had a choice. I don't know about anything else. I've never been any other way. And darker still. Colour has run out from the land. Only form is left: the clumped treetops like a dragon's back. The sky deepens to midnight blue. The orange of the streetlights is blotted to a fondant cerise; in pastureland, the pylons lift their skirts in a ferrous gavotte. Copyright (c) 2005 by Hilary Mantel Excerpted from Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.