This one’s a tough one: I try to point out when a novel’s style is not to my taste (but may be to others’) and I try to stay objective even when I don’t like the subject matter. But…
There are major spoilers in this review, in that I am revealing what the storyline gradually and matter-of-factly doles out over much of the course of the book.
Just before I read Beyond Black, I read The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks, a reprinted copy which cheerfully features all the outraged reviews the book received when first published over twenty years ago. “A repulsive piece of work”, say the reviewers, and “the public…will be relieved that only reviewers are obliged to look at any of it”.
All I can say is, see how much the world has changed in a generation when a book that ‘merely’ features animal torture and a couple of inventive child-murders receives such an outpouring of revulsion, and yet for Beyond Black, the most the reviewers can sink to is ‘unsettling’: and not a damn one of them saw fit to warn this unsuspecting reader that a central plot point is the repeated rape and prostitution of an eight-year-old girl by multiple men, with the complicity of her mother.
Arguably that’s a spoiler, which is why it seems to be studiously avoided being mentioned outright in most reviews; arguably, it’s also an essential bit of information in deciding whether to read the book or not. It’s never graphic, it’s just…there, being joked about. Dark humour? Oh, yes.
Anyway. Plot line: Alison Hart is a happily-obese medium on a dismal performance tour circuit around the dismal satellite towns of London. She has a horrible assistant, Colette, and a horrible spirit guide, one of her rapists, a chain-smoking, rough-talking old pervert; the rest of the rapists psychically move on in and gradually become stronger and more ‘there’ as she desperately struggles to make sense of her childhood memories and hurts and to fight her ghosts, all the while dealing with the hopeful, unsuspecting clients who want to believe there’s something nice waiting there after death, her jaded medium friends and competitors, and the constant sniping and complaints of Colette.
Characterisation’s excellent (that’s why it affected me so much), humour’s excellent – very dark, very witty, genuinely funny – plotting’s good, writing’s good: well, you could say that about both books, and yet one I could stomach and the other I couldn’t.
If it wasn’t for the child abuse (and also the frank unpleasantness of almost every character bar Alison herself)…but I can only say what those twenty-year-old reviews said about The Wasp Factory: It’s good, “…but there is nothing to force you, having been warned, to read it; nor do I recommend it” (The Scotsman). Unless you like your stories dark as hell and horribly bleak. The wrap-up of this book, an abruptly happy ending, is entirely unconvincing.
The book was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize. See, it’s a well-written book with deep themes. I just think it needs to come with a warning label. For a more measured look at this book and a profile of Mantel, please go away and read the New Yorker article instead.
