She has taken those moments between sleep and waking, when we hardly know who we are, or why, and turned them into a novel that makes the unbelievable believable. She has taken that ethereal halfway house between heaven and hell, between the living and the dead, and nailed it on the page. Like the earth- and airside realities that Alison is condemned to straddle, this deeply disturbing, excruciatingly funny novel exists in many dimensions - all of them darker than dark.Hilary Mantel has done something extraordinary. The pain and complexity they intuit can be deflected by comedy, sanitised by euphemism, distanced by metaphor but it can never be divorced.ĭifferent readers of Beyond Black read it differently: one of its strengths is to provoke argument. Writers are a sort of psychic huckster, she seems to be saying, but they also have a responsibility to find forms and words for experiences that for most of us are beyond articulation, beyond belief.

The vocation of a story-teller is to exhume just such hidden histories – and there is a sense of Mantel using this story to dig beneath the floorboards of her own mind. Morris isn't a ghost to Alison he is the incarnation of her injuries, as the child of a prostitute whose first abuse of many was to try to abort her with knitting needles. 'Prediction, though she protested against it, had become a lucrative part of her business'.īut prediction is only the business end for a 'sensitive', who can 'see straight through the living, to their ambitions and secret sorrows', and for whom the tacky newbuilds of England's brownfill colonies heave with buried horrors. There is an ambivalence in Colette's attitude that reflects the strange, shivering ambivalence of Mantel herself towards her central character: on stage, Alison is a huckster who queens it in her lucky opals as she works the petty neuroses and hot griefs of her audiences. Colette cannot see the appalling Morris - she knows him only by the faint smell of sewage - but she joined up with Alison after a spooky telephone conversation with her newly dead mother-in-law (another abusive relationship, if only at the level of filial estrangement).

Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel