It was always on the cards, to use a rather obvious metaphor, that Hilary Mantel would write a novel about spiritualism. Her earlier books were awash with hints of the numinous. Giving up the Ghost (2003), her recent memoir, duly connected these fragments of otherworldliness up to the circumstances of her own life. Now comes Beyond Black, a long, dense and complicated work which combines almost forensic accounts of the modern medium in action with some rapt reportage from in and around the M25 corridor, while leaving the reader in no doubt that these two kinds of banality are somehow connected.
The focus for this relentless and at the same time wonderfully funny enquiry is a pair of oddly assorted thirtysomething women: Alison, fat, esurient and permanently exhausted by her trawls around the Psychic Fayres and spirit-hands-have-touched-me expositions of south-east England; Colette, thin, bad-tempered and lately detached from her complacently self-absorbed husband (‘Any abstraction, indirection or allusion was wasted on Gavin, and in fact even the most straightforward form of communication … was a challenge to his attention span.’)
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