It’s a deeply literary thesis, and far from new. But as Alison maneuvers, wheedles, and extorts her way past her fiendish familiars, a secular-humanist version of this popular demonology emerges: each person has personal demons to confront or flee, and it’s worth each person’s time and attention-and ours-to participate in that drama, no matter how big or small the soul. Their wasteland of freeway junction towns, garden store car parks, and littered marshes is invincibly atheistic. This is the sort of supernatural significance that Alison’s punters are looking for and, as Mantel recognizes, will not find. The business of living is actually a fight against the hordes of Hell. Now every decision you make is charged with supernatural dimensions dragging yourself out of bed for another workday, bickering with your spouse, haggling with the grocer, it all adds up to eternal reward or punishment, with the Devil’s fiends trying to nudge you in the wrong direction at every turn. She does this, firstly, by grounding us in skepticism: The first long scene, in which we follow Alison working the crowd in an Enfield bar, has us scrutinizing her every blandishment-just like the punters-to see if we’re really supposed to believe she talks to ghosts.įor all that popular demonology had horrific repercussions-the deeply misogynist witch crazes, misdiagnoses of mental illness as “possession”-there is existential comfort in this notion that angels and demons are contending over your soul, however small. Mantel is a deft manager of register in her genre-bending novels, and in Beyond Black she never lets the supernatural conceit or her satirical eye run away with the tone.
Meanwhile, Colette books the dingy civic buildings and village halls in the urban sprawl along London’s orbital freeway she performs sound checks, hands the mike around the audience, haggles drinks from the house, and wrangles the motor lodge receptionists if she isn’t entirely free from doubt, still she sees enough to know Al is sparing the “punters” the grimmer details of the afterlife. In Beyond Black, the Spirit World is all too real, if surprisingly trivial, and Alison does commune with the dead, though this does not exempt her from the canny guesswork and little frauds that keep a good psychic stage show working. Before Hilary Mantel double-Bookered with her Cromwell novels, she wrote the horror-comic novel Beyond Black (2005), a terrifically bleak study of a much-abused medium, Alison, and her hard-nosed stage manager, Colette.
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