Beyond Black

Not long ago I found a copy of Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black in my local library, and read the synopsis on the cover. Oh, yuck, I thought. A bunch of occult waffle - crystal balls and ghosts and who needs it? I put it back.

What a mistake. Beyond Black is not only smart and viciously droll, but unexpectedly moving. The text has a drive and wit that carries along even sceptics like me. In fact, a viable alternative title might run, 'Spiritualism for Cynics'.

For Alison Hart, being a medium is a business. She tours the suburban satellite towns off London's ring road, Enfield, Harrow-on-the-Hill, giving tarot readings, mind-reading to crowds about the colour of their kitchen cabinets and passing along messages from dead relatives—for a fee. Meanwhile, her brisk, eternally disgusted manager Colette lobbies Inland Revenue to allow Alison to deduct the cost of her voluminous stage frocks from her taxes.

If Colette has never been completely convinced that Alison isn't a scam artist, we readers are well impressed. Al may have turned her freakishness to financial advantage, but she didn't choose to be this way, and she's no fake.

Indeed, I can personally testify to the soundness of Al's tarot readings: 'The two of pentacles is the card of the self-employed, indicating uncertainty of income, restlessness, fluctuation, an unquiet mind, and an imbalance between the output of energy and the inflow of money.' Reversed, 'it suggests mounting debt, and the swing between paralysed despair and stupid overconfidence.' Now that is a medium who knows what it's like to be a writer.

As for the ghosts, they are revolting. Yet since dead folks used to be live folks, why should deceased layabouts be any more socially palatable than flesh-and-blood corner boys?("You say they give trivial messages," says Al of the spirits, 'but that's because they're trivial people. You don't get a personality transplant when you're dead.')

The wraiths that loiter about Alison's house are down and out—crude, sexist, pig-thick, and unhygienic. Al's unkempt spirit guide and one of the novel's most marvellous creations, Morris is a terrible whinger: 'When you go to the station for a samwidge you can't get ham, you can't get a sheet of pink ham and some hot mustard like you used to get, they want to go stuffing it with all this green stuff, lettuce, and lettuce is for girls.' Morris is surly, filthy, sneering, peevish—and dangerous.

Colette is a piece of work as well—disappointed in love ('she had been able to get rid of Gavin for the modest price of a DIY divorce; it had hardly cost more than it would have to put an animal down'), casually brutal ('she had heard of women who, before departing, scissored up their husband's clothes. But Gavin's clothes, in their existing state, were punishment enough'). And Alison is a big character in every sense. Not only large hearted and haunted by what I will not give away, but massively overweight. I can't tell you how refreshing it was to come across a heroine who's fat.

A truly original novel, Beyond Black is clever, lacerating, and hugely entertaining.