Pushing back frontiers in Hilary Mantel's Beyond black

In Mantel’s disrupting and often exuberantly alarming narrative, the concept of frontier encompasses the material and spiritual worlds, as well as their interactions in space, time and the characters. In this essay the term is employed as a synonym for the borderline between the material and spiritual levels – setting, fictional time, personality on the one hand and socially accepted values and norms of common law and what is beyond them so far, on the other. The setting of the narrative is

… marginal land: … fields of strung wire, of treadless tyres in ditches, fridges dead on their backs, and starving ponies cropping the mud. It is a landscape running with outcasts and escapees, with Afghans, Turks and Kurds… [Mantel 2006: 6].

The clichés of contemporary England are ruthlessly subverted in terms of depicting the scenery in the novel, accumulating the images of gloomy unsettling locations. The squat which Alison had grown up in is a rallying point for a posse of fiends and petty criminals, in the book known as ‘the men’: ‘The house was a mess. Bits were continually falling off it’ [Mantel 2006: 183]. There is a sinister dimension to this villainous place and its inhabitants: ‘sometimes the men were there in a crowd; sometimes they swarmed off and vanished for days. Sometimes at night just one or two men stayed and went upstairs with her mum’ [Mantel 2006: 184]. This is a mum who shuts her daughter upstairs in the attic before going out with Gloria, one of the elusive images in the book, calling into doubt what is real and what is not. The

house is densely populated by the immaterial beings who still exist: the little old lady in pink, appearing in the attic, searching for her lost child, who vanishes soon afterwards in terror, muttering about ‘an evil thing’, that has happened in the house. At the age of eight Alison ‘used to see disassembled people lying around, a leg here, an arm there. She couldn’t say precisely when it started, or what brought it on. Or whether they were bits of people she knew’ [Mantel 2006: 223]. Moreover, there is a material sign of the sporadic violence Alison apparently suffered at the hands of the fiends – the backs of her legs are deeply scarred, of which there is no explanation in her flashbacks, except Morris saying: ‘They taught you what a blade could do’ [Mantel 2006: 234].

Thus, in Beyond Black we are offered a pretty vivid portrait of the Fiends’ ringleader, called Nick, who is one of Aldershot’s inhabitants. The Image of Old Nick refers to Satan himself, about whom Morris explains:

you from a tree and shoots off your kneecaps, I’ve seen it done. Because you don’t say no to Nick or if you do you’re bloo… he don’t ask you, he tells you. Because Nick, he hangs dy crippled. I seen him personally poke out a man’s eye with a pencil [Mantel 2006: 446].

And Alison comments: ‘He was in a league of his own’ [Mantel 2006: 224]. Morrison warns Al not to disappoint Nick, and later to Aitken-side: ‘The worst thing that can befall a spirit is to be eaten by Old Nick. You can be eaten and digested by him and then you’ve had your chips’ [Mantel 2006: 803]. As E. Lowry puts it, ‘In spite of his modern guise, Mantel’s Nick has impeccable scholastic credentials: he is the soul-eating Devil of traditional Western Christian iconography’ [Lowry 2005]. The image of Nick echoes Giovanni Modena’s Inferno (1408), a renown fresco in the Basilica of San Petronio in Bologna with its ‘as horrible as possible’ depiction of the tormented sinful souls and Satan eating and digesting them. Another allusion is to the apocryphal Apocalypse of St. Peter, saying that the punishment might fit the crime and include ‘Blasphemers are hanged by the tongue’, ‘the men …. are hung by their feet, with their heads in the mire…’ [Apocalypse]. Compelling visualization of human sinfulness in Man- tel’s work resonates with ‘Boschian’ style that is shorthand for weird fantasies.

Beyond Black abounds in dualities that are characteristic of Mantel’s works – the real and the imagined, the material and the spiritual, the living and the dead, the direct and the metaphorical, the genuine and the fraud. The main characters are also dual – a soft perceptive medium and her assertive business-minded assistant; the emasculated contemporary men and ‘grosser folkways of their fathers and grandfathers. They inflect one another, they share boundary conditions. They steal one another’s best tunes’ [Harrison 2005]. This boundary or frontier is a very thin ground: do the dead live? It seems that they do, as they send massages, lick glasses, like Morris, ‘running his yellow fissured tongue around the rim’, pursuing his sly war of attrition with psychically ignorant but vigilant Colette, he scratches his balls, others drive in the back seat of the car and take other people’s lorries, fart and natter away, talk to the tape. Morris wraps himself in the curtains, and does other nasty things to make him real . The horror and humour go along in Mantel’s novel, from ‘baroque speeches’ of Morris to Colette’s business language.

Morris is a modern manifestation of a much older spirit called Puck, a particularly mischievous sprite, who appears as a character in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream , and resonates in Morris’s threats to Al:

… you don’t frighten me, gel, if you go and work in the chemist I shall make myself into a pill. If you get a job in a cake shop I shall roll myself into a Swiss roll and spill out jam at inopportune moments. If you try scrubbing floors, I will rise up splosh! out of your bucket in a burst of black water, causing you to get the sack [Mantel 2006: 743].

Though not palpable, the spirits are discursively controlled by the living, capable of pushing back the ensnaring frontiers of reality and granting others the freedom to believe, exercising tarot cards, crystal balls and other spiritual objects, which constitute the material part of the trade. In Beyond Black , as in her other books, Mantel creates a frontier territory, where optic fibers of ectoplasm braid swooning glimpses of the ghosts of Rosamond Lehmann, an English writer and translator of the beginning of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Taylor,

British-American actress, of the 1950s and it seems that Mantel herself haunts the narrative like in her other novels – A Change of Climate (1994), and An Experiment in Love (1995). Alison too is lucid and sincere about her lived time experiences, and interstices in the narrative of her life. Much like a novelist, she can see ‘straight through the living, to their ambitions and sorrow’ [Mantel 2006: 17]. She is a medium – a transmitter of information that cannot be illicit from other sources to people. Alison is perfectly aware of her powers, treating them seriously: ‘I am a professional psychic, not some sort of magic act’ [Mantel 2006: 20]; the audience are ‘punters’, and mediumship is a demanding but quite profitable business.

By this, Mantel reassures the reader that there is no fraudulence or imposture in the book; we are invited to enter a narrative frontier, being treated professionally and introduced ‘to the metaphorical side of life’ [Mantel 2006: 140]. In Giving up the Ghost the writer puts both her personality and creative processes on display. Being a writer means to be sensitive, as Alison was, ‘…which is to say, her senses were arranged in a different way from the senses of most people’ [Mantel 2006: 17]. Both Mantel and her protagonist are sensitive to the spiritual world, reminiscing about their past and bringing back their memories:

When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led. All your houses are haunted by the person you might have been [Mantel 2010: 30].

In terms of time and social context, the narrative’s enunciation is the spiritual frontier in the ‘fag end of the Thatcher/Major years’ [Mantel 2006: 102], presenting it as a mental and psychic state as well as a social pattern, in which business replaces human relations with a more cost-effective version of the language. It is how Alison handles the audience, and the estate agency manager, car seller, hall managers, and Colette are handling her in their turn. In some parts it is ironic, but as a whole ‘It is the weakening or wearing away, the theft, of the real’ [Harrison 2005].

In her narrative Mantel disperses some signs to designate locative and temporal frontiers: for her trade Alison prefers conurbations ‘that clustered around the junctions of the M25, and the corridors of the M3 and M4’, and further, ‘She would fight her way in as far as Hammersmith, or work the further reaches of the North Circular. Ewell and Uxbridge were on her patch, and Bromley and Harrow and Kingston-on-Thames’ [Mantel 2006: 21]. Such locations seem to be more suitable for bringing the two worlds together, and gathering the audience, preferred by the spirits – Morris, Donnie Aitkenside, Keef Kapstick, Pikey Pete the gypsy, pursuing their sly tricks of attrition with psychically ignorant but ever vigilant Colette. The temporal frontier marker is princess Diana’s death in the accident, ‘It was in the week after Diana’s death that Colette felt she got to know Alison properly. It seems another era now, another world: before the millennium, before the Queen’s Jubilee, before the Twin Towers burned’ [Mantel 2006: 254]. Alison sees Diana on the verge of her leaving this world:

She’s getting in the car. She’s putting her seat belt— no, no, she isn’t. They’re larking about. Not a care in the world. Why are they going that way? Dear, dear, they’re all over the road! [Mantel 2006: 264]

Her knowledge is more than premonition; it is compelling and impeccable, referring to Diana’s psychic Rita Rogers, to whom Diana and Dodi Fayed flew for reading. Diana was a frequenter of the medium and in her afterlife conversation with Alison, the Princess insinuates herself into Alison’s mind as her mother. Hardly capable of remembering her own name and the names of her sons,

Her painted lips fumbled for names. ‘It’s on the tip of my tongue’, she said. ‘Anyway, whatever. You tell them, because you know. Give my love to … Kingy. And the other kid. Kingy and Thingy [Mantel 2006: 387–388].

Alison explains that in the spirit world lots of people are disoriented until they encounter somebody to put them right, they become vague and start to dissipate, spirit world is insipid and disrupted as well as the world of time, in which Diana dismantled herself in her media part and then by the act of self-abandonment. Harrison is right to call this scene ‘edgy’ and ‘most bizarre in the book’ [Harrison 2005]. Humour and sorrow permeate the narrative.

Personalities in the novel apparently manifest their frontier nature – Both Alison Hart, generous, opulent and receptive, and Colette, her stingy, thin and efficient assistant represent irreconcilable and selfgenerating oppositions in the novel’s metaphor:

Alison was a woman who seemed to fill a room, even when she wasn’t in it. She was of an unfeasible size, with plump creamy shoulders, rounded calves, thighs and hips that overflowed her chair…’ [Mantel 2006: 10].

There was too much of her: ‘In a small space, she seemed to use up more than her share of the oxygen; in return her skin breathed out moist perfumes, like a giant tropical flower’ [Mantel 2006: 10]. Even when she left the room, her presence as a trail could be felt:

Alison had gone, but you would see a chemical mist of hair spray falling through the bright air. On the floor would be a line of talcum powder, and her scent—Je Re-viens—would linger in curtain fabric, in cushions, and in the weave of towels [Mantel 2006: 10].

Colette, on the other side, was invisible, ‘For a moment she disappeared from her own view’ [Mantel 2006: 10]. She is assertive and has a knack for any kind of commerce, but spiritually she is ‘an organism with no function’ [Harrison 2005], it is doubtful that she is alive: ‘What’s wrong with me? she thought. When I’m gone I leave no trace. Perfume doesn’t last on my skin. I barely sweat’ [Mantel 2006: 11]. In search of herself, Colette dissociates herself from her husband and her job, fumbling for freedom in the frontier of the real and spiritual, clinging to Alison in search for herself, then drifting back to the ‘unreal world of Blair’s Britain, where as long as you can earn your living and invest your funds, a banal self-absorption is the order of the day’ [Harrison 2005]. Beyond Black articulates a void of meaning and belief in the present day world, where nothing is real but suffering, maiming and mutilations of mind and body, converging of Heaven and Hell and absence of the creator.

All Mantel’s metaphors in the novel merge in the metaphor of circus, the common ground for the real and the imaginary, where ‘the Fiends ply their trade’. Compelling oppositions between spirit and body, fear and love, despair and hope, male and female interact liberally on the frontier territory of the narrative.