And that’s just the part she can remember: The rest, the worst, she’s blacked out completely. Men hung about the house, drinking, betting on dog fights, and getting a leg over. Raised by a prostitute mother, Alison was sent to work, early on, on the living-room couch. And then there’s her spirit guide, Morris: “Other mediums have spirit guides with a bit more about them-dignified impassive medicine men or ancient Persian sages-but she had this grizzled grinning apparition in a bookmaker’s check jacket and suede shoes with bald toe caps.” Morris, who likes to slump on Alison’s bedroom floor and fondle himself, first met his hostess earthside, when she was a child, suffering a childhood too grim to be called merely Dickensian. She’s forever being hounded by dead old ladies who’ve lost a button: “A certain class of dead people was always talking about cardigans,” she muses. These hauntings can have a down-home charm. Offstage, however, Alison is at the ghouls’ mercy.
It’s a pleasure watching her ply the tricks of her trade, maintaining an uneasy balance between the worlds she calls “earthside” and “airside”: She doesn’t just give her customers what they want she tells them what to want. Occasionally she even locates their long-losts. “You need to drop a stone, she’s saying.” She wows them with her clairvoyance about their remodeling projects. First, Alison plays on the audience’s insecurities: “I’ve got your mum here,” she tells one woman.
The opening scene of Beyond Black gives us an account of one of her performances it’s a sustained, cohesive, enchanting piece of writing, akin to the long tracking shot that kicks off the film Boogie Nights-highlighting Alison’s skillful mixture of manipulation and genuine psychic skill. Mantel-a funny, scathing British novelist, too long ignored in the U.S.-is a master of dark subject matter, and in her latest, she’s created a protagonist who’s accustomed to darkness: Alison, a psychic, a woman trying to live a pleasant life, if it weren’t for the ghosts that keep tormenting her. So there’s something refreshing about the initial lack of ambiguity of the ghosts in Hilary Mantel’s new novel, Beyond Black: These aren’t psychic conceits, but otherworldly, fiendish, Scooby-Doo–style ghouls. The ghosts aren’t mere ghosts they’re symbols representing some repressed aspect of the protagonist-her dark desires, his secret crimes. Ghost stories, especially ones that come in the tasteful wrapping of the literary novel, often seem haunted far more by metaphor than the supernatural.
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