Beyond Black

In ghost stories, history goes haywire.  Repressed horrors impolitely refuse to stay buried; the dead return to claim justice from the unwary living; the damned, not content to remain in hell, reenact their evil deeds in signally nightmarish fashions.  Hilary Mantel revisits the classical ghost story tradition in Beyond Black, a novel that asks the reader to take it for granted that at least some professional mediums are, in fact, in touch with spirits.  Underpinning this tale of supernatural capitalism (complete with serious discussions of the best way to maintain one's crystal ball) is another, more familiar narrative: a woman recovering repressed memories of both childhood sexual molestation and her own revenge. 

Beyond Black's England appears to have wandered in from Browning's "'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,'" or perhaps Joyce's Portrait of the Artist.  The landscape seethes with decay and disuse, the rusted-out remnants of human refuse: "This is marginal land: fields of strung wire, of treadless tyres in ditches, fridges dead on their backs, and starving ponies cropping the mud" (1).  The English landscape is dead and crumbling, a bizarre mismash of discarded machines and discarded animals--a bleak inversion of the pastoral.  When Alison, our medium, buys a new house with her manager, Colette, the development crumbles and oozes around them.  It's no surprise that the human beings who occupy this landscape are somewhat less lively than the ghosts: mothers with almost bestial children, women who seek messages from the dead in order to compensate for their non-existent lives, men who eke out a questionable living by doing the odd murder. 

Colette maneuvers through this landscape as the soul of financial efficiency.  A master of bargaining and scheduling, she cuts heartless swathes through the ooze around her.  When she discovers, courtesy of Alison, that her "uncle" was actually her father, she instinctively vows to "sue the bastard" (70).  Perpetually bitter, resentful, and dissatisfied, Colette keeps the world's literal messiness at a distance through the dual disciplines of accounting and dieting.  But she, too, has her own ghost, of a sort: her ongoing obsession with her ex-husband, Gavin.  Colette spends years denying her need for Gavin, only to almost accidentally reconcile with him at the end; the resolution of their conflict is not so much a revelation of emotional fullness as it is of emotional absence.  Far from being overwhelmed by Gavin's admission that "I think you could do anything, Colette," "[s]he looked at him and her heart was touched: where her heart would be" (355).  The skeletal Colette isn't a ghost, but the absence at her soul's core reenacts the deathliness of the decrepit world around her.

But Colette also fails because she cannot bring herself to believe in the possibility of doing a disinterested good act.  Alison does one almost by accident--she temporarily cares for a homeless and clearly insane young man--and, as one of the spirits notes, "She's looking to commit a few others [good deeds].  They get the habit...see? They get the habit.  It's sad.  But they get the taste for it" (360).  It's part and parcel of the novel's dourness that goodness becomes a sort of drug addiction.  More significantly still, though, this world appears to have a devil, but God is AWOL (one spirit notes that he's never run across God, but he's met the other gent); while eternal punishment doesn't really seem to be in the cards, neither does an eternal reward.  The mediums offer an alternative--the promise that there is, after all, an afterlife, or that fate exists--but no theodicy as such.

Indeed, Alison's narrative turns out to be a singularly bleak rewrite and inversion of the Gospel narratives: after a failed abortion, a prostitute (not a virgin) gives birth to a daughter (not a son) who turns out to be fathered by "Nick" (yes, that old Nick).  Alison, who grows up surrounded by attack dogs and the occasional dismembered body, is sexually molested by several men; as the adult Alison finally remembers, she eventually castrates one man and removes another's eye.  (There are some distorted biblical echoes here.)  In reclaiming her memories, Alison "wins" two new spirit guides--a pair of supportive grannies--as well as her independence from Colette.  But the result is hardly the stuff of pop therapy: the grannies are an alarmingly mindless cheering section, and Alison remains haunted by her past.  Nor, despite her willingness to do "good deeds," does Alison come bringing redemption.  At best, all she can offer is the momentary comfort of the tarot cards.