Blog this item

Beyond Black

By Hilary Mantel

(13)

| Paperback | 9780007157761

Like Beyond Black?
Join aNobii to see if your friends read it, and discover similar books!

Critics

Other voices

Hilary Mantel's new novel, Beyond Black, tells the story of Alison, a Home Counties psychic, and Colette, her pragmatic, flint-hearted assistant. - Alison talks to the dead and relays their messages - 'Granny says she likes your new kitchen units' - ... (read full critics)

guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

Enfield, where the dead go to live

Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel 464pp, Fourth Estate, £16.99 Hilary Mantel has done something extraordinary. She has taken that ethereal halfway house between heaven and hell, between the living and the dead, and nailed it on the page. She has taken th ... (read full critics)

guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

See all critics

4 Reviews

2 people find this helpful

Beyond Black is odd. Its very bleak, and at times depressingly dark and nasty. But it's not the ghosts that plague Al in her dreams and every waking minute that provide the shocks - it's middle England and human nature. A wide range of colourful characters, both dead and alive, weave in and out of a ... (continue)

Beyond Black is odd. Its very bleak, and at times depressingly dark and nasty. But it's not the ghosts that plague Al in her dreams and every waking minute that provide the shocks - it's middle England and human nature. A wide range of colourful characters, both dead and alive, weave in and out of a story that manages to pull together everything that makes us human - forgiveness, happiness, humour, lust, greed and revenge.
At times its difficult to know what's real and whats not... which is where the book both excels and falls down. There were a few occasions that broke the hypnotic nature of the book. I found myself struggling to comprehend quite what was going on and it meant I had to pull out of the gloriously constructed world and go back and reread parts - however, by keeping you a little unsteadily on your toes the book does manage to throw you around.
I enjoyed Beyond Black for all the right reasons - it's original (not often do the ghosts in a ghost story get upstaged by the 2.4 children family next door who just happen to be obsessed with the neighbourhood watch and the weather) its sharp, witty and clever - and its very real. But sometimes there were just a few too many voices at once which slightly obscured the descriptive storytelling beneath.

Is this helpful?

Kieran Delaney said on Dec 29, 2008 | Add your feedback

Such a good title

This is the third book by Mantel that I've read and I'm very struck by how different it is from the other two. There's almost no common ground except her tendency to slip back and forth between the two main characters' points of view constantly, even sometimes within the same paragraph. The subject ... (continue)

This is the third book by Mantel that I've read and I'm very struck by how different it is from the other two. There's almost no common ground except her tendency to slip back and forth between the two main characters' points of view constantly, even sometimes within the same paragraph. The subject matter is fascinating and as usual, very well researched. I did wonder at times how she planned to wrap it up - it is a bit shapeless in the middle - but the end is suitably fitting.

Is this helpful?

Top of the pile said on Sep 2, 2011 | Add your feedback

A difficult books and style to get into, but eventually it becomes quite easy to ready. The story is definitely weird and something I've never read before, that's for sure. It gets slow at times, but all in all a quite nice book.

Is this helpful?

Bleedindarklove said on Jul 1, 2011 | Add your feedback

*** This comment contains spoilers! ***

Ghost-written

This is my first bite at Hilary Mantel. I picked this up for pennies - had not been induced at all by the hoo-hah around Wolf Hall; I went for the theme, which I guess I had started to set a few weeks earlier with Ackroyd's 'English Music' - the world of the medium.
The opening is unfortunately as ... (continue)

This is my first bite at Hilary Mantel. I picked this up for pennies - had not been induced at all by the hoo-hah around Wolf Hall; I went for the theme, which I guess I had started to set a few weeks earlier with Ackroyd's 'English Music' - the world of the medium.
The opening is unfortunately as turgid and contrived as Ackroyd's piece but my advice is: Stick with it, for not everything that comes through from the other side, as it were, is straightforward at the first.
The black (and in this sense, Mantel doesn't get beyond a very bleak vision of contemporary England) humour is indeed cutting, rather than abrasive, and the main characters are, if not likeable, somewhat plausible for a generation brought up on The Office and Dawn French. As a geo-psychical description of present-day England, this work is sharply effective; as a story containing characters that one can understand or feel any degree of empathy for, it falls short. This for me is especially the case with regard to 'The Fiends', the main character's spirit guide and his collective of unruly and uncouth pals. They are Norman Wisdom and Arthur Askey twisted through some temporal and spiritual anomaly, filtered through the fractiousness and violence of the 1970s - bumptious and vindictive at the same time, fitted only to play the role of mediators for an unforgiving vision that Mantel seems to have of men, and working-class ones in particular: their guts are scooped out of the hollow life that came in the wake of the victory over the Nazis, their hearts formed of the hedonism of the 1950s and 1960s, and their morals shaped by the same ethical free-for-all that allowed the easy loving of the flower children turn into the hate-filled yet cold rampage of the Yorkshire Ripper.
There is no final repose at the end of this book, no RIP; it's uncomfortable to read since it seems less like a tongue-in-cheek description of a certain female-dominated sub-cultural milieu than a sustained attack on an entire gender and its social setting. Definitely a piece of chick flick-knife literature.

Is this helpful?

OwnedLibrarian said on Jun 5, 2010 | Add your feedback