Mantel Piece
Hilary Mantel’s highly original and very odd novel received much praise when it was published in 2005. Somehow it has managed to escape my attention until nowStephen Lang: Booked Out
My fellow blogger Stephen Lang wrote the above in March of this year. At the time, I commented that I’d picked the book up a couple of years earlier (when it was in paperback, natch’) and had enjoyed the first couple of chapters but then had been distracted by something else and hadn’t been back since.
Until now, that is. Stephen said he’d be interested to hear what I made of it, so I thought I really ought to write it up.
Hilary Mantel’s ‘Beyond Black’ tells the story of the medium Alison (I say medium, she’s really an extra-large), her repulsive, wretched and yet still slightly dangerous spirit guide, and her assistant-manager Colette, as both Alison and Colette try to break away from their past.
Stephen illustrated his review with a quote from Philip Pullman, which said that it was:
One of the greatest ghost stories in the languagePhilip Pullman
Now it might not fit my description of the classic ghost story (for me you can’t get much better than M.R. James: if you’ve not read The Mezzotint, ‘O Whistle and I’ll Come To You, My Lad’ or ‘Casting of the Runes’, then go and read them immediately: they can be downloaded free from the M.R. James part of Project Gutenberg), but it is still undeniably a story about ghosts.
Only these ghosts — while undeniably of the spectral kind — are even more ghosts of the past, and are quite brilliantly coloured and drawn, and even named through the eyes of Alison the child: Keith Capstick becoming the somewhat less flattering Keef Catsick, for example.
The story does cover some unpleasant topics, but they are handled well and, like in The Dark Knight, most of the nastiness is ‘off-screen’.
One of the points that Stephen makes is that
Mantel skilfully explores how horrors in the real world can easily surpass any in the supernatural.Stephen Lang: Booked Out
Skilful, yes. But I’d disagree slightly. For me, it’s not so much about how horrors exist in both the real and supernatural worlds: for me it’s simpler. It’s about good and bad choices.
Alison’s past forces her to try and fight against the bad by doing good when she can; we see how most of the characters are human, with human fallibilities and human weaknesses, at times being selfish, mean, controlling or just not willing to put themselves out to help other people. But still very much people for all that: still kind, considerate people, just with weaknesses that we all have and to varying degrees succeed in struggling against.
However the ‘fiends’ confronting Alison are cut from a different cloth: they are mostly out-and-out bad, even if you see the occassional redeeming feature pass fleetingly in front of you.
To me, what the book is saying is that we’re all human, we all fight against making ‘bad’ decisions (as in, not choosing the correct option between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’), and those of us who struggle against them can strive, as Alison does, to keep our heads above water if we confront our demons. Whereas those who pretend their demons don’t exist, or pretend that they aren’t demons at all, will keep making the wrong choices, and will drift towards “out-and-out bad” until they are like Morris, Aitkenside, and Keef Catsick.
Because you know they were human once. Until their choices dragged them down to a point where they made even worse choices…
Those who are put off by the fact that the book deals with the supernatural will be missing some great characterisation, and a story that builds very well, although I couldn’t help but feel the ending was missing a bit more now confrontation, and I felt some of the events were foreshadowed a little too heavily, meaning that some of the revelations simply weren’t.
But nonetheless, it is a good book. It’s well written, with perhaps the most rounded characters (no pun intended) that I’ve read for a long time, with even the bit part characters (neighbours, other psychics) being considerably more than cardboard cut-outs. Hilary seems to have gone to a great deal of effort with her characterisation, and it has certainly paid off.
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Interesting thoughts. I read The Giant, O’Brien shortly after this and it wasn’t nearly as engaging, although it hasn’t put me off trying any of her other fiction.
That reminds me, I bought an old Penguin paperback of MR James stories recently. Time to dig it out.