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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
The French, who respect literary critics more than the British, have a phrase for it: the succes d'estime - the book that the professional judges choose to admire, perhaps in disdain of popular taste. I had thought that Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black was an example, but when she came to speak about it to the Guardian book club it became clear that she had entranced plenty of readers too. They discussed the lives of Mantel's characters - particularly Alison, the professional medium, and Colette, her hard-hearted sidekick - with the strength of feeling and the amusement proper to a novel that has come alive. Yet it was the dead that we mostly talked about. Mantel was quizzed about the supernatural in the novel, where dead spirits speak and cavort. Mantel pointed out that nothing happens that might not be merely what Alison hears or sees. The novel credits her conviction, but only as an imaginative necessity. Though Alison could be thought of as severely deluded, she had to be imagined as sincere. Liz Sneath, one of those writing to the book club weblog, picked on this in praise of the novel. It was "a validation of the view that psychics don't simply make things up and that the elaborate conspiracies that would be needed to 'set up' situations are as much beyond belief as the world beyond black seems to be". The novel succeeds because it does not reduce its characters to charlatans or cynics. It was clear that the readers who came to the book club event did not share the exasperation of the reviewer in the Spectator who regretted that the novel gives plausibility to the supernatural. One reader was perturbed by the mix of the Christian and the unChristian. Alison appears to have no religious beliefs, yet we hear from the "fiends" who haunt her that her father might well be the Devil. Another reader described eloquently how, though he thought of himself as a person without supernatural beliefs, he never doubted the voices and visions in the novel so long as he was reading. Several others were both disturbed and convinced by the story of Alison's appalling childhood that emerges in ghostly mutterings and jumbled memories. One reader spoke powerfully of real cases in which children with terrible histories had created ghosts and spirits, supernatural beings who were the projections of their terrors. Was the wonderfully dyspeptic vision of orbital southeast England the author's, or did her characters have an inkling of it too? Mantel was quite candid about the novel's roominess, allowing her enjoyable passages of set-piece satire. One reader on the weblog felt that the novel needed "a good prune", though those at the event praised the "bagginess", as Henry James would have disapprovingly called it. One reader who thought that it could have been shorter also relished the "state of the nation" passages that make the book long. "Loved the descriptions of life around the M25: awful." Some readers contributing to the weblog have complained about Mantel's two main characters. Tom Chivers, one of several who found them distinctly "unlikeable", was aware that he was going against the grain of a critical consensus. "Perhaps I have completely missed the point of this whole book in some way," he observed, "because I have yet to read a review that is less than utterly, rapturously glowing." The fact that the central characters do not reach out to our sympathies troubled more than one reader. "I neither liked nor cared for Alison and Colette," said Mary Gilbert, who also disagreed with the verdicts of those "excellent reviews". "While I appreciated the quality and wit of the writing in this book, I found it hard to care about any of the characters", observed Jenny, another dissenter. There were bloggers who shared the evident enthusiasm of those who came to hear Mantel speak. "I definitely cared about Alison (while Colette was entertainingly dreadful)" wrote Simon Barnes. "Just loved it." The awfulness of Colette was a delight for many (I include myself) who discussed the novel with Mantel in person. There was special attention to the pitilessness of Colette, a character as flinty and sardonic as any in contemporary fiction. Was there no hope for her, asked one reader? The novelist felt that she had got just what she deserved: a life back with the mediocre and spineless Gavin. Alison, however, did seem to have been redeemed. The author was happy to agree that her black book was also a narrative with a moral shape. Alison performs an act of kindness and is saved from her "fiends". They are left behind on the executive housing estate and we have a happy ending - if circling the M25 on the way to Sevenoaks in the company of a couple of dead OAPs could be thought of as happy. John Mullan is professor of English at University College London. Next week he will be looking at The Sea by John Banville. Record your views at guardian.co.uk/books To order a copy of Beyond Black for pounds 7.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on O870 836 0875 Caption: article-Book club.1 Yet it was the dead that we mostly talked about. [Hilary Mantel] was quizzed about the supernatural in the novel, where dead spirits speak and cavort. Mantel pointed out that nothing happens that might not be merely what [Alison] hears or sees. The novel credits her conviction, but only as an imaginative necessity. Though Alison could be thought of as severely deluded, she had to be imagined as sincere. Liz Sneath, one of those writing to the book club weblog, picked on this in praise of the novel. It was "a validation of the view that psychics don't simply make things up and that the elaborate conspiracies that would be needed to 'set up' situations are as much beyond belief as the world beyond black seems to be". The novel succeeds because it does not reduce its characters to charlatans or cynics. There were bloggers who shared the evident enthusiasm of those who came to hear Mantel speak. "I definitely cared about Alison (while [Colette] was entertainingly dreadful)" wrote Simon Barnes. "Just loved it." The awfulness of Colette was a delight for many (I include myself) who discussed the novel with Mantel in person. There was special attention to the pitilessness of Colette, a character as flinty and sardonic as any in contemporary fiction. Was there no hope for her, asked one reader? The novelist felt that she had got just what she deserved: a life back with the mediocre and spineless Gavin. - 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.