If you have not read Beyond Black, then you ain't seen nothing yet.
The ghost story has needed, for some time, frankly, the shit scared out of it.
Though the genre never ceases to attract those besotted and bewildered by the dead, stories of haunting have never seemed more tedious in their need to explain their modus operandi. Due in no small part to the assembly line of horror-less films that consumers of the supernatural industriously devour, the form’s power to tear a hole in our minds to access other realms has transmogrified into a duty to drag darkness into light: to placate rationalism, materialism, and other golden-calf principles that robbed the spiritual spectrum, and our vocabulary for it, of potency.
Enter Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel. Currently on the shortlist for the 2006 Orange Prize, longlisted for the 2005 Booker Award, and now in paperback, the book does not humor fiction's willing suspension of disbelief but abolishes it. The living and non-living intermingle haphazardly without explanation: “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.” Mantel’s disconcerting landscape stretches between comedy and tragedy, the domestic and the epic, earth and hell. The comforts of heaven, or, for that matter, further explication, exist far away, if at all.
Alison Hart is an obese medium, or “sensitive,” traveling the M25 motorway, practicing her psychic arts in dilapidated theaters and community halls for denizens of the blighted suburbs of London. Her talent is dependent upon her spirit guide, Morris Warren, a noxious circus performer when he was “airside.”
By turn comic and cruel, Morris chastises, humiliates, and pesters Alison unwaveringly when he is not gallivanting with his dead cronies in pubs and “any site where there’s diggings, workings, companies of men going about men’s business, where there’s smoking, betting, and swearing.” This minion is all the more absurd and disturbing since “other mediums have spirit guides with a bit more about them—dignified impassive medicine men or ancient Persian sages—but she had this grizzled grinning apparition in a bookmaker’s checked jacket, and suede shoes with bald toe caps.” Ignoring him is futile, and long-distance separation results in a painful crawling sensation in her spine.
In Alison’s shows, attended by the lovelorn, the abandoned, the bereaved, and most of all by women with their hearts in their mouths, Alison must demonstrate the veracity of her gift and curse. Of course, attendees who coughed up ten pounds already want to believe or entertain strong ideas about “Spirit World,” but there is still a burden of proof, the need to confirm by “giving them a nudge, not a pinch. It’s about impressing them without scaring them, softening the edges of their fright and disbelief.”
Although this authentication process is different from an outright explanation of the supernatural, the audience requires empirical, or at least empathic, evidence. While that would be a natural position to take at such an event, Mantel’s staging of this dialectic intrigues precisely because the reader, privy to the maddening voices in the back of Alison's skull, does not require acts of verification. Unlike the audience, you have no choice but to believe—a rarity in a tradition that has made an art out of testing, mystifying and conniving judgements.
“She fights down the panic we would all feel,” writes Mantel, “trapped with a crowd of dead strangers whose intentions towards us we can’t know. She takes a breath, she smiles, and she starts her peculiar form of listening. It is a silent sensory ascent; it is like listening from a stepladder, poised on the top rung; she listens from the edge of her nerves, at the limits of her capacities… The skill is in isolating the voices, picking out one and letting others recede—making them recede, forcing them back if need be, because there are some big egos in the next world.”
Mantel’s exquisite style of realism exerts itself equally upon Spirit World and Britain’s most run-down corners, dissolving any membrane of separation, rendering them both, unquestionably, alive. This effect is introduced in surprising gems like, “Her voice was low, sweet, and confident, and her aura was a perfect adjusted aquamarine, flowing like a silk shawl about her shoulders and upper arms.” After training the reader to read the way Alison sees, more gruesome sights and events feel as palpable as they do to our unlikely heroine, including the appearance of Princess Di, post-crash, in her wedding dress, “crumpled and worn, as if dragged through the halls of the hereafter, where the housekeeping, understandably, is never of the best.”
The diabolical heart of Beyond Black concerns Alison piecing together her childhood memory, ravaged by trauma and visions, to find the identity of her father. After being lured to accept Alison’s strangely credible world, her past comes as a far more frightening place of sights and sounds to stomach. Among other realizations, we learn that Morris’ gang of petty fiends were, when alive, itinerant guests of her prostitute mother, all of whom aided and abetted Alison’s rape, torture, and other “lessons she wouldn’t forget” whose scars striate her legs and mind. The blackest of evils reside in these mostly atmospheric scenes and their seedy illustration that such acts physically and psychically warp children detrimentally, even worse than Alison.
Although not morbidly obese, Beyond Black could stand to lose 130 pages. Also, much of the story concerns Alison’s relationship with her manager, Colette Waynflette, a foil character whose all-gristle, no-heart attitude grows irksome and pointless. Still, it is worth reading not only for being a ghost story with all the mundane oppression of the modern world but for Mantel’s heart-stopping prose: “There is a tension headache at the back of her neck and, at the auditory rim, a faint high-pitched singing, like nocturnal wildlife in an equatorial forest, or God’s fingernail scraped against glass.”
Between the Covers is a biweekly book review and publishing analysis.
