Beyond Black

This was an odd one. It was by no means an enjoyable read - the characters are singularly unappealing and many of the situations seem terribly forced - when I finished it I felt that it would pass quickly from my memory. But it hasn't - Mantel has an odd way of finagling her concerns into your

Show More

head, unappealing as they may indeed be, and I find myself thinking about the situations far more than I would have expected many months after completing the book. Those expecting a lightweight humourous look at the occult be warned - there is some funny business, but it is black, indeed businesslike, and said occult is a backdrop to darker musings on the nature of being - relationships, family, depth and depression. Most odd.

Show Less

I have to admit: I had a hard time writing this review. How can a book be intriguing and boring at the same time? That's the state I find myself in as I put together my thoughts on Beyond Black.

In summary, Beyond Black is the tale of Alison, a psychic, and her business partner/personal assistant,

Show More

Colette. Their relationship reminded me of "The Odd Couple" - you couldn't get two more different people together. Alison was a big presence - vibrant, full-figured, sweet-smelling and congenial. Colette was a drab sidekick - beige, skinny and condescending. How they ended up together is still a mystery to me, even as I finished the book.

Alison is forever tormented by spirits. Her spirit guide, Morris, is a dirty pig, often found fondling himself (thank goodness only Alison could see him). As the story progresses, Mantel reveals that Alison knew Morris before his death, which opens up the intriguing parts of the book: Alison's tortuous childhood. Bit by bit, Mantel feeds the reader information about Alison's past - what was done to her and what she did. These bite-size nuggets help propel the story; however, it was not enough. Beyond Black is mixed with so much "non-action" that it overshadowed the compelling stuff.

Parts of Beyond Black were darn funny (my favorite scene was Princess Diana talking to Alison), but the most of it was too dark for my taste. The pace of Beyond Black was uneven, and I think it could have been tightened by a good 100 pages. But we all know that Mantel can write - and I look forward to reading my next Mantel selection, The Giant, O'Brien, very soon.

Show Less

This is a book that hits you around the head, drags you up and down the country, deposits you in farflung corners of the south east rarely visited by more sensitive novelists and delves down deep into the uncomfortable, the subversive, the completely insane and the desperate. As a novel it's

Show More

brilliantly controlled, highly ambiguous, funny, heartbreakingly sad and honest about the sadness and suffering in ordinary lives. The density and fluidity of the prose makes it both highly readable and continually surprising and unsettling. Is Alison 'really' psychic? Who are the men in her head and her body? Where does reality end? Mantel makes all of these questions both vitally important and, ultimately, unanswerable

Show Less

This completely bizarre book about a spiritualist and clairvoyant who is trying to recover repressed memories of her very abusive childhood while she gets a stick-up-her-a## assistant out of her shell and earns her living communing with the dead is like LSD in print. It's one hallucinatory scene

Show More

after another with an ending that is just right. Poor fat Alison, the reader is unsure of what to think of her but ends up rooting for her, wishing there were some way she could overcome her literal and figurative ghosts. And poor beige Colette, the only exotic thing about her is her name. Recommended to anyone who wants a new look at how women can make it through life.

Show Less

This is a very hard book to review. I should really not have liked it. The premise is one I don't believe in or have much interest in and the characters and actions were dark and dirty and unlikable. But somehow the book works. Mantel is really good writer.

So what is this book about? Well, it's

Show More

about an overweight medium, Alison, who meets Colette who has just left her husband. Colette becomes Alison's manager - a 24 hour manager, even moving in with Alison. She books her shows, sets them up just right, and keeps Alison company through long nights of interference from the spirit world. As their relationship progresses, Colette gets more an more controlling, monitoring Alison's eating habits and becoming an abusive partner in most ways.

Then there is Alison's personal story, which Colette never really understands. Alison seems to be the real deal as far as mediums go. She has a spirit guide named Morris who is a dirty, cruel, little man. As the book progresses, we see that Morris and Alison have a history in life as well. Morris was part of a group of men that were customers of her abusive prostitute mother. Alison has incomplete flashbacks of a horrifying childhood. She was terribly abused, but did she commit some atrocities as well? As Alison's abused childhood comes out I kept thinking, oh all these spirits are just in her imagination from her damaged past. It's some way for her to work it out. Maybe. But Mantel doesn't really go there. She doesn't seem to concern herself with whether or not all this is true; it's a vehicle for her to explore these characters she's created. And that's why it worked for me. She wasn't trying to convince me what the spirit world is like (or that it exists at all) or that mediums really have a knowledge of the spirit world, but the book is a creative way to explore some interesting characters.

So despite not liking the subject or the characters, I really liked this book. I've only read Mantel's historical fiction before (which I love) so I was hesitant to change my opinion of Mantel by reading something I thought I might not like. In the end, I'm so glad I did since this really increased my respect for Mantel. This was a very, very different book from the others I've read and it was still great.

Show Less

This is a brilliant book. Clever, funny, inventive, and written in prose as smooth as cough syrup. It's also not a book for anyone looking for a pleasant read about psychics and ghosties. Anyone hoping for a fun romp, let your fingers flee to the next shelf over. Beyond Black, as it's title

Show More

declares, is black indeed. Sarcastic, dark, satiric, and at times, very disturbing. I couldn't put it down. Also, as an epileptic, I was astonished as just how well indeed Mantel described what certain types of seizures are like. Very impressive.

Show Less

I enjoy Mantel, and I’m not entirely sure why, given that she has some massive (like, Dworkin-massive) issues with men. And religion. And bodies. And human interaction. But mostly men. (In this book, anyway. The other of hers I’ve read [Fludd] is heavier on the religion-issues.) Apparently her

Show More

autobiography reveals that she is batsh*t insane. I do not see why one would have to read the autobiography to figure that out. But if you’ve a high tolerance for really black scenarios, you could do much worse than read her stuff.

Show Less

I wasn't a big fan of this. It was too long, the plot disintegrated towards the end, and for quite a comical book there was far too much misery, which made the humour hard to accept.

Hilary Mantel has always scared me a little when I've seen her interviewed. I find her a bit like a Margaret Thatcher of writing; if I ever met her, I'm pretty sure she's one of those women who would make me feel like I'm 12 again, and I'd be waiting for her to inevitably tell me off for doing

Show More

something naughty. This was my first foray into her writing, and I have to say she's pretty damn good at it.

Beyond Black is not so much a horror story as a bleak tale of exhaustive malign spirits from the afterlife mixed with the joyless reality of unpleasant people in soulless suburbia. I loved the main protagonist Alison, who is the overweight 'sensitive' (psychic medium) around whom the book is based. Alison had a harrowing childhood of abuse and neglect, living on a sink estate with a prostitute mother who unsuccessfully tried to abort her and a constant stream of violent criminals and soldiers from the nearby Aldershot barracks. Her past torments her on a daily basis as one of the men from her childhood has become her unwanted malevolent spirit guide, and Alison finds herself increasingly struggling to keep the past at bay as her childhood nemeses begin to congregate again in the afterlife.

Helping to keep Alison's life on track is her live-in manager Colette, who Mantel superbly portrays as a rude and cold android of a woman who is ruthlessly efficient at dealing with their business affairs and anyone who crosses their path, from sales people to nosy neighbours. Mantel plays out the relationship very well between these two, and we watch aghast from the sidelines as Colette increasingly takes control over Alison's every decision, gradually turning her emotional guns inward on the very person she's employed to protect.

Mantel takes her time developing the relationship between these two. At first the rope frays so gradually it's imperceptible, but as the years go by it unravels at an ever increasing speed. We start out not so much liking Colette as respecting her straight talking and effective management where Alison's concerned; she's Alison's bodyguard to life's day-to-day nuisances and unpleasantries, leaving Alison free to fight her mental battles with the afterlife. Whilst Alison is strong in her dealings with the spirit world, she's completely passive to Colette's dominance of every aspect of her life, and while we increasingly warm to her inherent good heart, Colette's directness becomes exposed as the cloak of a classic bully.

I really enjoyed this novel. It was highly inventive, unpleasant and disturbing at times, but the fantastic characters hook you in despite the raw and brittle backdrop.

4.5 stars - highly original and thought provoking.

Show Less

Clever novel that combines a sharp dig at the occult pretensions and fakes of the 80's and 90's with the horror endured when being able to commune with the dead is real. Love to see a TV series with Dawn French or in the key role and Catherine Tate as the logical (superficial !) assistant.

This novel is both horrifying and maliciously funny. Alison –Al- Hart, overweight medium, is making a good living, giving private readings and doing psychic fairs, but is always alone- at least, where living people are concerned. She can never escape from the dead, who follow her and bother her

Show More

constantly. And here’s the thing: people don’t get any smarter or nicer when they die. They don’t undergo any spiritual awakening. If they were nasty and mean in life, that’s how they are in death. Al, survivor of a horrific childhood of poverty and abuse, finds she has an old childhood tormentor as her spirit guide. He swears, drinks, gropes women, and sits around masturbating. Only Al can see him, but that’s bad enough.

When fate brings bitter, recently divorced Colette her way, Al hires her as a manager/partner. Colette takes charge of Al’s finances and schedule, and they find themselves enjoying a moderate success. Al jumps at her chance to live in a place where no one has lived before, where she hopes she will encounter no spirits. But life cannot be nice for Al; nastiness follows her even into a newly built subdivision (which has its own special brand of horror). Even though she tries to do good things and think good thoughts, she is tainted by her past. She attracts badness to herself; she must come to terms with her past to rid herself of it.

The book is brilliant, and very dark. Mantel’s wit cuts like a knife through the middle class, the lowest of the lower class, the way heavy people are treated, real estate developers and New Age believers. This is not a cheery type of funny book; the title tells us how black the humor is. This is very unlike Mantel’s Cromwell books, and just as good in its own way.

Show Less

The best review I can give this novel is that I actually reached the end, which is more than I can say for A Place of Greater Safety. That said, I did wander off about midway through, and read two other books with recognisable direction and likeable characters. Given either of those traditional

Show More

features, Hilary Mantel's overblown ghost story - or kitchen sink drama, whatever she was aiming for - could have been interesting, but I grew bored with listening to Alison and Colette bitch at each other, and couldn't even discern, from the lack of plot, what their miserable relationship was leading to. I kept checking the page count/percentage on my Kindle, thinking, 'Nearly there!'

The two stars are for Mantel's obvious skill at crafting realistic, if deeply detestable, characters, and her cynical observations of everyday life. I also enjoyed Alison's descriptions of what goes on 'beyond black'. Two hundred pages less, and I would have perhaps stayed awaked longer and finished the book without interruption!

Show Less

I really don't know why I didn't enjoy this book more. I think I wanted the psychic to be more forceful, to take more control of her life.

While I have no truck with the beliefs of psychics and their ilk, this novel hit home. An evocation of putridity in low income/lower class British life (note that a similar exploration of all that is putrid in high income/high class British life would be a different novel altogether).

Alison is a

Show More

saint and doesn't know it. Colette would like to be, but fails.

Scary, funny and true.

Show Less

Alison is a thirty-something medium who makes her living travelling from venue to small venue on the M.25, connecting people to their lost loved ones. Her life is pretty disorganised until she meets Colette, who’s just about to put an end to her failing marriage. Colette moves in and takes

Show More

Alison’s affairs successfully in hand, but soon the relationship begins to disintegrate.

For Alison’s world is inhabited by a cast of dead characters from her childhood who are no better than they were when alive – and that’s pretty damned evil. The terrible secret of that childhood, hidden even from Alison herself, is revealed gradually: there’s no plot as such, yet this book would be worth reading for the beautiful prose alone, and I promise that by the time you’ve turned the last page you’ll never see the world in quite the same way again.

I enjoyed the telling descriptions of the psychics and their craft and the glimpses of Alison’s dark childhood. I’d have liked Colette to be less abrasive towards Alison, although this tension does drive the story forward. But the most amazing thing about this book is the way Hilary Mantel makes the reader suspend disbelief in the unseen dimension that exists all around us. Maybe she knows something the rest of don’t.

Show Less

It committed two of the worst crimes in my pretentious yet lovable opinion; it blathered on about Dianna dieing and made several references to the twin towers. I get grounding a novel in the real world but I don't think referencing major events that we hear about until we are blue in the teeth

Show More

isn't the way to do it. There was a degree of let's not explain that fully or give a definite ending to seem literary but at least it managed to be interesting, human, and, in parts, quite beautiful.

Show Less

I was unimpressed by this book. There was no real plot development, just a rambling through a mediums life. Two things that were endearing about Beyond Black, however, the prose and the main character, Alison.

As I read this, I knew it was very well written and inventive and admirable for those reasons, but oh I just LOATHED it! I found the whole reading experience like being forced to spend time in a horrible place full of nasty people. I couldn't work out where the book was coming from at all, it just

Show More

seemed to be mean about everyone in it. Having said that, I think maybe I was just having an off week with it!

Show Less

If someone offered you psychic powers, the ability to communicate with the dead would not be a good one to choose. The dead are devious, spiteful and importunate, and Alison Hart is never free of them. Her spirit guide, Morris, is the bane of her life, tormenting her and wrecking her attempts to

Show More

make her life better, while his constant jibes remind her of events from her childhood that she only half remembers and would rather forget altogether.

I enjoyed this book a lot, and was glad to see that Collette got what she deserved in the end.

But what is it with mediums and the name Alison? The medium in this book is called Alison, as are the medium heroines of the U.S. TV series "Medium" (based on a real-life medium of that name) and the U.K. TV series "Afterlife".

Show Less

There was a point, around about chapter 9, when I was sure this book and I were going part company. The plot headed off in strange directions, and it was like chasing shadows along dark alleyways. Up to that point the story, involving a medium and her business partner, had been illuminating, quite

Show More

funny and very entertaining. But there is a darker side to this novel and its grip on the plot increased as the pages turned. It is an odd mix – lighthearted banter with the shadow of grim events in a character’s past.

Looking back, what I liked most about this book were the sections involving the community of psychics, the bitchy banter between them, and the author’s interesting take on the spirit world. The plot strand involving the main character’s childhood was altogether harder to grasp and much is left for the reader to interpret. But it is skilfully rendered, the way childhood memories often appear distorted, fractured, hard to make sense of. Characterisation was excellent throughout, and I was struck by the way characters all seemed to ‘fit’ their names.

One thing that did strike me was the strong anti-men feeling that pervaded the novel. There were hardly any sympathetic male characters, and the one nuclear family to feature was portrayed in a negative light. Events in the main character’s back story might account for this but I couldn’t help wondering if there was a broader agenda here.

Show Less

A tale where the story is in the describing. Not a great deal happens. The feeling of the main character, Al, and her psychic abilities is finely drawn. But really, the rest of the characters left me rather cold and I kept waiting for the story to move. It never really did. Read "Wolf Hall"

Show More

instead, much, much better.

Show Less

Clever creepy tale of a psychic working in 21st century England, her relationships, childhood and the people who believe her.

My Dad actually insisted I read this book, so, I felt obliged to finish it.
I did find it hard going because of the childhood history of the main character.
The first few chapters were like trudging through treacle, particularly when the childhood stories came in, but once I'd got through that I

Show More

found I started to want to know what was going to happen.
A lot of interesting ideas and theories about the afterlife, I think what you would call quite gritty characters, and I liked the ending.

Show Less

Alison Hart is a successful medium with a troubled past; Colette is a cold but efficient manager. Almost on the spur of the moment, they decide to form a business partnership because each of them wants to escape the status quo: Alison is tormented by the spirits of her violent and malicious

Show More

abusers, and Colette wants to escape a marriage where her husband pays more attention to the car magazines than her. Over the following seven years, we follow their chalk-and-cheese, love-hate relationship until it comes full circle again.

I guess that I came to this book with certain expectations: the review snippets on the front and back covers suggested a ghost story (which is what I was hoping for), but this is only true in the broadest sense of the word as that there are spirits of the dead that haunt people earthside, yet it is mainly a novel about confronting one’s inner demons and learning to accept them. Hilary Mantel’s writing shows more maturity and skill than was encountered in A Place of Greater Safety, but I still feel that several promising plot strands disappointingly ended in literary cul-de-sacs, whereas other narrative threads appeared to me as distractions from the main character developments, like the author had somehow got sidetracked and forgotten what and who she was writing about. The underlying subject of Alison’s traumatic childhood and her battle with an eating disorder should, by all rights, not be funny, but thanks to the author’s wicked sense of humour (I would describe it as beyond black) they are somehow turned on their heads. She imbues her characters with life (even the dead) and warmth, and yet I wouldn’t want to be at the receiving end of her rather sharp pen when she’s harbouring a grudge against something: several places and occupations seem to be getting the Mantel treatment here. On the whole I’d say that I enjoyed the book more than I was irritated by its having too many loose ends in my opinion, but I would expect more from a writer of her calibre.

Show Less