After the success of Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel needs little introduction. Having said that, Beyond Black, originally published in 2005, is a very different offering to her now bestselling book. It tells the story of Alison Hart, a medium in the modern world, making her way around the demos and private clients of her business via the seedy hotels and service stations of the dirtier parts of England’s South.

Alison is surrounded by spirits. But these are not the polite, eager to please and communicative spirits the Victorians would have us expect. They consistently disrupt her interaction with the ‘real’ world, invisibly interrupting conversations and plans, finding ways to make her follow the path they would choose for her, and, as most people cannot see them, she feels she must protect the world from the realities of ‘Spirit’. They make her ill as she relives their shocking ends and disgusting deeds. Even Diana appears to her with smudged mascara and confusion. Alison’s own spirit guide, Morris, is remorselessly sordid and attracts more spirits of the same kind. Many of these spirits are conjured from Alison’s past, old ‘friends’ of her infamous mother. They invoke often shockingly dark memories from her childhood which she must piece together to give her a chance of release. But who is her father? Her mother certainly doesn’t seem to know or care. And how did MacArthur lose his eye, or Keef his balls? Where did she get the scars on the backs of her thighs?

Mantel mixes a dark and difficult past with a present filled with solitude and hope. Alison and her assistant/manager, Collette, seem to embody the two extremes of female loneliness, the fatty protections of the compulsive eater and the cold hardness of the divorcee, both shunning the right kind of male company in their own ways and attracting all the wrong sorts.

Mantel is a master of description and the motorway corridors and housing estates of the world she creates for us are spaciously and gloriously delivered to us. The unexpected slant on the life of a medium is filled with delightful (and horrible) detail. Beyond Black is a book that you will look forward to returning to each time you have to put it down.

Reviewed by Pam Lock

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