This is a troubling book. It’s a comedy but intensely dark. I can’t tell if the unanswered questions make it more or less grim. But it’s an intriguing novel, with so much to say about time, place and modern life.
It’s a simple story in some ways, though a big one. Alison is a medium, she lives on the edge of the spirit world and so can communicate with the dead. They are around her all the time, jostling and faffing and crowding her; pushing at her thoughts and making her do things. They don’t seem to be just in her mind, but at times physical beings too.
She’s working as a psychic when she meets Colette, a dull, straight bookkeeper who has just split up with her husband, Gavin, and she says she’ll work with Alison, help her keep her psychic business in order. They work together for five or so years, getting to know each, travelling and eventually living together. Colette becomes something like Alison’s PA.
The plot follows their time together, from the early days when they’re getting on, to the end of their time together, when Colette eventually despairs of Alison’s other-worldliness and the weird life she seems to have been dragged into.
Even more central are Alison’s tussles with her past, and the ghosts that plague her. Her Mum was a prostitute who subjected Alison to all manner of injuries, with a horrible group of men apparently abusing Alison from an early age. And it’s this group of men who are the main spirits that haunt Alison – Morris (her foul-mouthed spirit guide), Aitkenside, Keith Capstick and others.
She is haunted by them, and by her past, which won’t leave her alone. Worst of all, there’s a sense that the torment they give will go on for eternity; even when she’s dead she’ll just join them in the spirit world and it will continue.
Alison occupies an in-between world, she’s stuck between the living and the dead (earth side and spirit side), and is trapped in her memories, seemingly forever. Do these spirits exist, or they a metaphor for Alison’s past? I think the only assumption is that, yes, these spirits exist for Alison as much as the so-called real world does; they are two parts of the world, even if most people can’t see the spirit world.
And this in-between place that Alison occupies is reflected in the setting of Beyond Black, the specific place in which it is set. She works on the edges of London, around the M25 – dull towns, samey venues, soulless hotels, travelling along A roads past industrial estates, retail outlets and the sprawling Heathrow. It’s a kind of grey nowhere on the edge of somewhere.
It’s particularly interesting because there are a number of authors who make these kinds of edgelands the subject of their writing too – JG Ballard and Ian Sinclair are best known – but this is a very male group, and Mantel is an unusual fit with them, particularly given her more recent fame for historical fiction.
When we learn about Alison’s horrific early life, too, we find there’s a piece of wasteland behind her house where anything can happen. It’s lawless, and uncontrolled, and dangerous. And when, eventually, Alison and Colette move into Admiral Dive, their new-build, it’s got a feeling of no-place about it. A new development, it’s unconnected to a town, in a stand-alone set of houses, without even the bland identity of suburbia.
This all, I guess, reflects the world that Alison inhabits. She’s always occupying an-between space – between worlds, trapped in her own memories, unable to move on and develop, to become the kind of person she might otherwise want to become.
Giles book reviews 