BEYOND BLACK - HILARY MANTEL

A fitting title for sure, this book is bleak. I read Mantel’s novel about the French Revolution like a decade ago and remember really liking it. I remember being struck by how good the writing was, and thought I’d give another of her novels a chance. She’s most famous for her historical fiction, though I thought I’d try something else from her. After hearing she’d written a ghost story, I set my sights on that. This book lived up to expectations, it is indeed a very dark ghost story. The novel centers a woman who works as a psychic across suburban England. Psychic might not be exactly the right word, she thinks of herself as a “sensitive” which basically means someone who can see and talk with ghosts. She makes her money performing in front of audiences and working with clients one-on-one where she speaks to the dead and relays messages back from “Spirit” the books term for the afterlife. This woman, Al, teams up with the recently divorced Colette, a woman who does not have any of these powers but who helps manage the business end of things and helps them get moderately successful. The book is funny in a British way too, there’s lots of short, brief asides about the bleakness and ghastliness of British food and the British suburbs. There is a whole side-story about the fortune-teller psychic “scene” (including a pair of feuding male psychics named Merlin and Merylin) and the ways that they all use their abilities to try to make money. Colette is mean, especially about Al’s weight, and curt while Al is kind but obvious. At first this dynamic is confusing, why is Al keeping this mean woman around, but as the book delves into Al’s childhood, it becomes clear why she seeks out this dynamic. It turns out that the ability to speak to and see the dead is a terrible curse. Death doesn’t improve anyone, people are just and mean and petty as they were in life and Al is constantly the target of their abuse. She’s often cleaning up and censoring what the dead are actually telling her to make her clients feel better. There’s a general satire in the book about modern Britons not wanting to really know anything about the past, from living in totally new suburbs, to not knowing their own grandparents’ names. Slowly, as we learn more about the spirit world and how monstrous and horrific it actually is, it becomes clear that Al’s spirit guide, Morris, and Morris’ friends, the ghost she sees most often, are actual figures from her horrific, rape-filled childhood. They’ve continued to torment her from beyond the grave. The afterlife in general is vague, Al doesn’t seem to fully understand it either, but it seems that only the petty and evil are sticking around as ghosts, the good and virtuous are elsewhere. Also, there are references to the literal devil, but Mantel keeps this tantalizingly obscure and confusing. While I think these ghosts do work as a metaphor for trauma and childhood adversity, the book makes it pretty clear that the ghosts are real, they aren’t just in Al’s head, which I found a really refreshing choice. Too often in horror there is a final twist where we learn the Monster wasn’t real, that it was just some trauma or psychological block or all in a character’s head. The last portion of the book, where you finally figure out exactly what has happened in Al’s past, is amazingly dark and feels well earned and impactful after 300+ of getting to know Al as an adult. There was an early section where she does past life regression stuff and receives an in-womb memory of her mother trying to abort her with a knitting needle, to give you a taste of what sort of stuff is in this book (it gets much worse than that). Overall, the book was quite good and engaging. It was a bit long and repetitive, though if it was shorter the shocking information towards the end might have been seen as shocking-to-be-shocking so perhaps the length was needed. Again, the writing was some of the best I’ve ever read, it maintained a consistent spooky vibe with some mordant, wry, humor and on a sentence-to-sentence level, it was beautiful. I cannot stress enough how well she describes various utterly disgusting British meals. I’m not sure if I’m really interested in her Oliver Cromwell novels, though if she writes another ghost story, I’m there.