Beyond Black

"Absolutely. You might say that many of her novels have ghost stories at their heart, be they historic ghosts or literal ghosts of the more supernatural kind. This book is about a medium, so we are in supernatural territory. She spends her career traveling around the fringes of London, doing small seances and events in little halls around the very edge of the city, leading a very dreary existence. For a time, we are led to believe that she is simply a fraudster or charlatan. Soon we realise that actually, she actually does indeed have these spirit guides with whom she communes and that many of them are incredibly unpleasant voices, a cast of despicable characters who have a hold on her and provoke her all the time. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . About halfway through the novel—no spoilers – she makes a big decision. After becoming a little bit more successful, she decides to move house, to move away from her past, to cut all the ties and move somewhere brand new, where there is no ghostly resonance, to rid herself of all of these spirits. She won’t be haunted anymore. And so she and her really horrible manager set off shopping for a new build house. There’s a long sequence, which sustains the rest of the novel, with an obsession with newbuild houses and all the accoutrements of newbuild developments. I doubt there has ever been such a great depiction of the Postmodern newbuild houses in Britain or of post-80s neighbourhood housing in all of fiction. This unparalleled brilliance in describing something so seemingly banal makes this book a comic masterpiece, although it’s a very dark novel as well. Dark and very, very funny. Mantel delightfully skewers the house-buying industry, the process of buying a house off-plan, the small rooms, the endless debates about whether tiny rooms could be knocked together, and then maybe you don’t need to put the wall up when you build the house, but which would cost more money… It all comes across like an elaborate and byzantine way to make more money out of the people that are buying the houses, and shows the horrible superficiality of an industry that is providing something that is actually an essential human need. This taps into my own obsession with icons of the invisible variety. Mantel reveals, in ways that are very funny indeed, but also deadly serious, things that are hidden in our urban fabric, even though they are in plain view. Things that maybe we haven’t thought about very much. On first reading this book I came away really shocked that somebody had written about this and in fact that somebody had noticed it at all. It was a surprise to me that you could write about it at all, this almost totally invisible phenomenon that went on for decades—these things just got built, in some kind of almost unaccountable way. And nobody ever wrote about them. When we did write about suburbia, it was typically about 1930s suburbia, Victorian suburbia, or bygone decades. It was never about the actual suburbia that was being built now. So this is a brilliant novel about the icons of modern suburbia, these weird houses with their weird, generic developer names, These works of fiction helped pull the scales from my eyes, and helped me think about architecture, the way that things that have been built in my lifetime, the unexpected angles and points of view that reveal the extraordinary in the commonplace. There are lots that I really admire, actually. With a period of reflection in the 20-odd years from the millennium, I actually feel a huge amount of emotional connection to those projects, in a way that has surprised me. At the time the Millennium Dome was built, for example, at the turn of the last century, it was maybe a bit of a national joke. And now you realise, for a period of time, people have really, really adopted that building. And it actually has come to mean something important, the many events it has hosted over two decades. I was very drawn to Norman Foster’s ‘Gherkin’ . Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I think a lot of failed icons are buildings that want to be an icon, but just aren’t and are just substandard. You can no longer see the Gherkin from Central London, only from East London. No other line of site is available to you. It is the only viewpoint of it now, as it, like many worthy buildings, has been crowded out by a lot of really substandard, anonymous constructions that have been put up by developers. They’ve all arrived on the scene with the idea that they were all going to be icons, and they were all going to be the ‘next Gherkin’. The fanciful names and nicknames tell you as much. With a few exceptions like Rogers’ Leadenhall building, one of a small number of recent buildings with any kind of architectural merit, many if not most are distinguished above all by the fact that they are just there as an investment opportunity. They were not built to enhance anyone’s life, or the life of the city, as a place that we live in. I think that’s really obvious. That’s where the idea of the architectural icon really falls down. And yet it continues. In Nine Elms in North London, for example, scores of internationally famous architects and all manner of developers, with much financial backing from all over the world, are in competition with one another putting up competing icons next to one another in an area that has come to feel simply like a failure of planning and a failure of basic decency, really, in a time when we’ve got a housing crisis in Britain. Especially if you consider that many of these new developments will result in a load of places no one’s ever going to live in. They’re just an investment opportunity. It is outrageous. And in a way, that sets itself up as an icon of contemporary London, the most desirable place you could possibly want to live in your life, but where no one actually lives."

"I just love this book. It’s one I go back to again and again. I probably re-read it every couple of years. On one level, it’s bleakly satirical. It’s got all Mantel’s wit and incredible precision and turns of phrase. And, I don’t know for certain, but I think she was interested in psychic mediumship, and she certainly describes in her more biographical works certain close encounters of the spirit kind, put it that way. In Beyond Black , we have Alison Hart, a professional psychic medium, and her sidekick—I suppose her manager—Colette, who is business minded, not very interested in mediumship at all, but very interested in getting the most out of Alison. It’s a very unlikely relationship, which at times is portrayed as quite toxic. Yet they are also codependent on each other. Mantel depicts that with her usual wit and insight. Alison the medium is what Victoria Smith’s book would call a ‘hag.’ She’s older, she’s overweight. Similarly, Colette is not a particularly likeable or attractive person. They’re engaged in an enterprise that just isn’t that attractive. Yet, when you read the opening pages, you know we are in very liminal territory. It starts in a car. Alison is being driven to her next public engagement by somebody who we eventually come to learn is Colette: There are nights when you don’t want to do it, but you have to do it anyway. Nights when you look down from the stage and see closed stupid faces. Messages from the dead arrive at random. You don’t want them and you can’t send them back. Then, here’s Alison speaking directly, a couple of paragraphs later: It’s no good asking me whether I choose to be like this, because I’ve never had a choice. I don’t know about anything else. I’ve never been any other way. So here are those universal themes: lack of choice, lack of agency. In this case, Mantel is showing another face of witchcraft, which is mediumship. A very archetypal depiction of witchcraft, in a way. And she does it with incredible compassion. Readers tend to come down on one side of the fence or the other: either the medium Alison is quite literally possessed by a number of spirits, including the malevolent Morris; or, on another level, it might be an extended metaphor for Alison’s childhood trauma. So again, we have these themes of passive versus active, worldly versus otherworldly, all embodied in one physical presence, who is compelling to people because of a power this person appears to hold, but also a presence that people find repellent. Absolutely so. It wasn’t necessarily a conscious decision, because the character of Martha evolved as I wrote her. When I began, it was like I had a postcard in my head: a picture of a woman in a green, faded, tatty, long dress, standing in a herb garden. I could see she was older, her hair was under a coif, and she was looking at me. That was the starting point. I started free-writing about this figure. It took a long time for her to come fully into focus: her situation, her background, the witch hunts. It took me a long time to understand that she didn’t speak. The first time I tried to write a scene with Martha, I wanted to write some dialogue, but every time it came to Martha’s turn to speak, it was like trying to get blood out of a stone. That happened a few times, and actually halted my writing of the book. How was I going to write a novel with a protagonist who doesn’t speak? Then it dawned on me that she couldn’t speak. Then, after drafting many thousands of words I came to understand that Martha’s not speaking was the result of trauma, and was also standing in for the speechlessness, the silencing of women in that period and in fact throughout history. It’s not necessarily that they have chosen not to speak, although lots of women have made that choice. Even women who have spoken up have been disbelieved or ridiculed, or had their words used against them, as often happened in the English witch hunts. Once I understood all that, it became possible to carry on with the book. The other thing that influenced me was that, in the early stages of writing the novel, I was also working part time in prisons—male prisons—and with guys who were there, for the most part, because they had murdered women, or were in for abuse or domestic violence. That kind of thing. Twice a week I was going in and spending time with these men, and then coming away to write about women who were victims of violence hundreds of years ago. That whole theme of what was being said, versus what was not being said; what was being owned up to and what was not being owned… that was all running in the background. Being an older woman myself, definitely falling into Victoria Smith’s category of the ‘hag’, and going into those prisons—it was a confrontation with that phenomenon, an interesting experience to have."