Beyond Black

Hilary Mantel

2005 • 451 pages

Ratings6

Average rating3.8

Alison Hart is a medium by trade: dead people talk to her, and she talks back. With her flat-eyed, flint-hearted sidekick, Colette, she tours the dormitory towns of London's orbital road, passing on messages from dead ancestors: 'Granny says she likes your new kitchen units.' Alison's ability to communicate with spirits is a torment rather than a gift. Behind her plump, smiling and bland public persona is a desperate woman. She knows that the next life holds terrors that she must conceal from her clients. Her days and nights are haunted by the men she knew in her childhood, the thugs and petty criminals who preyed upon her hopeless, addled mother, Emmie. They infiltrate her house, her body and her soul; the more she tries to be rid of them, the stronger and nastier they become. This tenth novel by Hilary Mantel is a witty and deeply sinister story of dark secrets and forces, set in an England that jumps at its own shadow, a country whose banal self-absorption is shot through by fear of the engulfing dark.

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Valerie Headrick

I got to a point and just wished this book would end.

January 14, 2015

Herman

Een oudje, maar daardoor niet minder fijn.

Een wat verlopen spiritueel medium (Alison) op zoek naar een assistente en de saaie Colette komen elkaar tegen op een paranormale beurs, en van het een komt vervolgens het ander. Langzaamaan ontspoort de boel behoorlijk. Colette is vooral praktisch ingesteld, en heeft het verder niet zo met het paranormale.

Occult', she discovered, meant hidden. She was beginning to feel that everything of interest was hidden. And none of it in the obvious places; don't, for example, look in trousers.

Alison kan communiceren met de doden (ja echt), maar krijgt het daar steeds moeilijker mee.

There are the lights, she said, the noises, the waiting, the loneliness. Everything slips out of focus. They suppose they're in a queue for attention but nobody attends. Sometimes they think they're in a room, sometimes they sense air and space and they think they've been abandoned in a car park. Sometimes they think they're in a corridor, lying on a trolley, and nobody comes. They start to cry, but still nobody comes. You see, she said, they've actually gone over, but they think it's just the NHS.

Haar spirit guide (A colleague had once said to her, ‘It seems to me that your guide is on a very low vibratory plane, very low indeed. Had you been drinking when he first made contact?) interfereert steeds meer met haar werkzaamheden, en langzaam maar zeker komt er steeds meer naar boven over de jeugd van Alison.

She thought, I wouldn't like to have access to my thoughts before I was born. An image came to her of her mother, patiently fishing for her with a knitting needle.