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.’) Installed as Alison’s PA-cum-partner, cruelly efficient Colette (‘Are you going to sell me something or shall I drive up to Notcutts on the A30?’) soon starts rousting the hitherto rackety equipage of her employer’s professional career into gear.
Alison’s personal life, on the other hand, is rather less susceptible to organisation. Not only does her teenage past, down in the Aldershot boondocks with slapper mum and an assortment of vicious male attendants, contain unimaginable horrors; its long-departed cast — foul-mouthed Morris, Keith Capstick, Pikey Pete and the rest — contrive to haunt her present. As the psychic cavalcade of which Al is a principal ornament continues its erratic progress (some of the funniest bits follow the on-stage embarrassments of her less talented colleagues) around the Thames Valley hotels and leisure centres, the babble of spirit voices grows ever more insistent.
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