StaceyD’Erasmo

Beyond Black
Hilary Mantel
Henry Holt, $26 (cloth)

Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir
Hilary Mantel
Picador, $14 (paper)

8 The world may end in fire or in ice; alternatively, it may end again and again, in the present and in the past, in flames or in pieces, by wind or by water, or both, or neither. But whenever the world ends in the work of the British writer Hilary Mantel, who has published ten volumes of fiction and one memoir since 1985—and it ends often, loudly, and badly—somewhere a woman is writing it down. She is piecing together the bones. In Mantel’s bitter and unpredictable country, apocalypse arrives over and over, in various forms: matricide, homicide, conflagration, madness, betrayal, infanticide, unspeakable violence, deaths of the soul and of the heart, spontaneous combustion, and the appearance of the devil himself. (Mantel must have read her Muriel Spark.) It would be a mistake, however, to conclude from this that Mantel’s great theme is destruction. On the contrary, she is the high priestess of survival, and particularly of those survivors whom the world does not favor or easily love. “This is all very well while it lasts,” thinks one abject young lady on the verge of ruination, or annunciation, in Mantel’s 1989 novel Fludd, which revolves around the highly ambiguous figure of an alchemist and mystic named Robert Fludd, “but it won’t last, will it, because even Hell comes to an end, and even Heaven.” If one were to sum up what Mantel sees as worldly knowledge, particularly as experienced by women, that’s it in a nutshell.

A Mantel heroine—and they generally areheroines, with a scant sprinkling of heroes—is the one who makes itthrough the fire intact, a blood smear or two on her sleeve maybe,her children often dead, burnt earth behind her, but undeniablyalive. It is extraordinary for any serious fiction writer to publish11 books in 20 years (and another novel, The Woman Who Died ofRobespierre, is due out in the United States in 2006), but it is evenmore extraordinary for a writer to have the stamina to continuallydrive her characters to the brink, and over it, to rehearseannihilation in such clear, complex, and varied detail, in so manydifferent settings and eras, and with such an unerring instinct fornarrative velocity. There being no Troy for Mantel’s Helens toburn, they are often to be found lighting just the right number of matches next to exactly the most lethal amount of dynamite, andstanding on top of it when it goes up. When the smoke clears,they’re still there. Like the Virgin Mary, they are long-suffering,prescient, and indestructible. Also like the Virgin Mary, they tendto bring into the world tremendous forces over which they don’tquite have control, and which can bring on vast, lethal consequences.This uneasy, combustible mix of power, suffering, and thesupernatural has suffused Mantel’s work since her first novel,Every Day is Mother’s Day, in which an apparently dim-witteddaughter is victimized by her mother, a neighborhood medium, untilthe daughter finally hauls off and kills the mother by throwing herinto a wall. But the cruel medium has sufferings of her own due toher dark gift. “They come here,” she reflects after a reading fora widow that has gone badly, “for a Cook’s Tour of the otherworld; as if it were in some other but accessible place, they use melike an aeroplane, like a cruise liner. . . . I shall give it up, shethought, because it is making me ill.” Robert Fludd is said to beable to see the future; Frances Shore of Eight Months on GhazzahStreet sees and hears things that others claim aren’t there. In hermemoir, Mantel writes of her own propensity for seeing ghosts, “floatinglacunae in the world,” and, one day, the devil.

Prescience, forMantel, is less a strategic advantage than a freakish hyperempathy, aform of psychic stigmata. It entails often painful responsibilitiesand obligations. It is a vocation that is not to be taken lightly, nomatter that it may seem a parlor game to the rest of the world. Inher new novel, Beyond Black, the complicated and compelling Alison, aprofessional psychic, or “sensitive,” is also made ill by thecontinual impressions of other people’s longing and misery. Afteran evening’s performance, “she’ll have to regurgitate or elsedigest all the distress she’s sucked in from the carpet and thewalls. By the end of the evening she’ll be sick to her stomach fromother people’s chemotherapy, feverish and short of breath; ortwitching and cold, full of their torsions and strains.” And as forthe other side—or “airside,” as Alison refers to it—the deadare no less taxing than the living. They have their own agendas, theysteal from you and sometimes sexually assault you, they lie, theysmell, they’re obnoxious, they’re nasty, and nasty-minded. At onepoint, Alison explains to her non-psychic assistant, Colette, about“the perfidy of the dead, their partial, penetrative nature, theirway of dematerializing and leaving bits of themselves behind orentangling themselves with your inner organs. She talked about hersharp earsight and voices she heard in the wall. About the deads’propensity to fib and confabulate. Their selfish, trivial outlook.Their general cluelessness.” Prescience doesn’t alleviatesuffering; it compounds it, particularly in the case of the sensitivewho possesses it. Part of her heroic task is to survive thechallenges not only of this world, but of the next one.

The nextworld, for Mantel, is not this one exalted and perfected. Instead,like memory, it is a tattered, seething place, a dustbin of desireand despair, the site of wars that never end. It is certainly notheaven, but it is not quite final enough to be hell either. It ismore like purgatory in the form of the most appalling bus stationimaginable, where the bus to eternity never comes. The medium, themediator between this world and the next, is as stranded as anyghost, with no choice but to endure both difficult worldssimultaneously. Her gift is nonnegotiable and often makes her a bitof a monster. “Messages from the dead arrive at random,” thinksAlison, who is massively, grotesquely overweight and riven by variousconflicts. “You don’t want them and you can’t send themback.” The title of Mantel’s memoir, Giving Up the Ghost, is moreironic than descriptive—the psychic woman, the woman with an unrulypsyche, can’t really give up any of the ghosts or devils whom it isher burden and life’s work to recognize. She can only negotiatewith them and establish from time to time an uneasy truce. As Mantelwrites, “What’s to be done with the lost, the dead, but writethem into being?” They will always be there, tapping insistently atthe window. It could be that a book nearly every other year is barelyenough to catch the flow, to limn all the desperate faces pressed atthe glass. How many reliable points of entry, after all, do the deadhave?

If each of Mantel’s books, then, is a séance orsummoning—and I suppose it could be argued that all books,particularly novels, are summonings of one sort or another—her mostrecent two represent the moment at which the medium, after many yearsof only semi-voluntary servitude to the other side, finally grabs hergabby visitors by the scruffs of their invisible necks and tells themto look sharp. It is the moment, in a way, in which she, who has beenlike their child, subject to their whims and often frighteningactions and impulses, now assumes her role as parent. She isn’texiling or abandoning her spirits; she is clear about who she is inthis world. But both books announce who is in charge from here onout, who will henceforth control the means of spiritual production.They mark, in their appropriately double form, a turning point in aterrain for which I don’t exactly have a word. It’s not a sexualpolitics or a psychoanalytic landscape; it’s not exactly a fable,either, though it is to some degree all three. Perhaps one could saythat this novel and this memoir, this fantasy and this reality, areroughly parallel narratives of the end of apprenticeship. Or, to usea term that Mantel, who was raised Catholic, might find alarming,they represent something like a process of ordination. By this I meanthat there is a bringing into alignment, an ordering: the bad spiritsare contained, the good spirits are encouraged, the medium is nolonger in doubt about who’s who and is empowered to performexorcisms when necessary. She is the inventor and interpreter of acosmology; she pins angels in the cerulean felt up top, devils to thered worsted below. Insofar as this world, or any world, can ever befigured out, she figures it out, and takes up her rightful placebetween heaven and earth. Her nausea may not ever go away, but itmarkedly decreases.

Beyond Black is a bit of a road movie, a darkbuddy picture about the adventures of Alison, the psychic, and themousy but determined Colette, who is adrift in life until she becomesAlison’s assistant, amanuensis, driver, comforter, and all aroundgirl Friday. Both women are lonely. Alison—huge, fractured, andgifted—is plagued by visions and nightmares and by a jumble ofmemories that she can’t quite parse but that seem to be incrediblygruesome. Colette’s suffering is more ordinary, small-time; she isboring and plain, she makes a bad, loveless marriage that doesn’tend so much as sputter out. She is leading a pointless existence inthe modern way, filled with the quiet desperation of frozenvegetables and tinny television shows. Mantel is lacerating on thetiny humiliations that add up to a greater total abasement. WhenColette marries, the groom is belching, her dress is hired, and hertiara is “a special order to fit her narrow skull.”

Colettebegins consulting psychics and attending “psychic fairs,”searching for a higher love. She finds it in Alison, who provides allthe drama and explosive metaphysics one might want, and quite a bitof donkeywork besides. Mantel often reminds the reader that Coletteand Alison are not lovers in the physical sense, but they are clearlyconducting the sort of sexless psychological romance that lonelyheterosexual women engage in: a dance of mutual admiration and envy,a symbiotic pairing that real sex would fatally disrupt. Colette andAlison are, literally, soul mates; their souls have adhered one tothe other. Their bodies are mostly problematic, beside the point. Asthe two women traverse the British suburbs and countryside, troopingfrom one gathering of psychics to another, they find themselves undercontinual fire from Alison’s past, a messy, sordid amalgam ofmalevolent spirits and horrendous memories. Alison’s “guide” isa lowlife named Morris, who, as it turns out, is hardly a randomspiritual choice. He knows things about Alison, and about whathappened to her as a child, that eventually provide a key to herinnermost life.

Alison’s task in the novel is twofold: to unpackher own, roiled, earthside psyche, and to rid herself permanently ofthe airside companions like Morris who cause as much trouble to herafter death as they did when they were alive. Colette’s task, likeher woe, is simpler: to accept her own ordinariness and embrace it asher lot. Reconsidering the dull husband she left, she thinks,“Gavin may not be much of a man, but he’s there for me in acrisis. At least he’s alive. And there’s only one of him.” Thatthis might constitute a happy ending for the likes of Colette isn’ta tragedy, just a life. Alison’s fate, like Alison’s heart, isstranger and more rare. She will always be, whether she likes it ornot, highly aware of what Mantel beautifully calls “theunderscape” of any scene. Even the least dramatic of these—abuilding site, a hedge, a field—is dense with history, with liveslived and pains endured. True evil makes a spectacular, blood-soakedappearance in this novel, as it does in much of Mantel’s work, butas the novel unfurls she poses an interesting metaphysical question:which is heavier, a few acts of mega-evil, or the accumulated weightof generations of ordinary sorrow? Which is harder to bear, in theend, and how does one bear it?

In Mantel’s memoir, Giving up theGhost, the question of what can be borne and how one bears it is onlypartially answered by the de facto nature of life: we bear what wehave to because we must. What’s the alternative? But Mantel, likeAlison, is not just a survivor, but an adept. She insists ontransmuting leaden experience into literature. Her experiences as apoor, smart northern girl, and Irish to boot, growing up in 1950sEngland were leaden indeed. It is cold in Mantel’s childhood, bothliterally and figuratively; she is often ill with various fevers; sheis a combustive mixture of aggression, intelligence, and nerves. Oneof her favorite toys is the Magic Slate, on which you can write andwrite all your secret thoughts and then, in a second, pull a tab andmake the writing disappear. When she discovers that, in fact,telltale traces of the writing are left on the slate’s plasticsheet for anyone to read, she puts the Magic Slate aside.

Shame isan unnamed player in Mantel’s childhood, and its influence growswhen her mother runs off with another man to whom she pretends to bemarried. They change towns, but the shame seems to follow them,invisible and powerful. Her biological father disappears from herlife forever. Worse, as the only girl in this illusory, outcastfamily, Mantel is hardly her stepfather’s favorite (“men wantsons”): “Nobody wants a ten-year-old girl with sticky-out teethand a habit of flinching when you speak to her. . . . whose stockingswill always be laddered and whose fingers will always be inky, athing not childlike, not womanly, always remembering, always knowingthings.”

Mantel is haunted, sensitive, peculiar, fanciful,successful in school, and profoundly uncertain at home. At the age ofseven, she experiences a vision of what can only be calledevil:

I can’t see anything, not exactly see: except the faintest movement, a ripple, a disturbance of the air. I can sense a spiral, a lazy buzzing swirl, like flies; but it is not flies. There is nothing to see. There is nothing to smell. There is nothing to hear. But its motion, its insolent shift, makes my stomach heave. I can sense—at the periphery, the limit of all my senses—the dimensions of the creature. It is as high as a child of two. Its depth is a foot, fifteen inches. The air stirs around it, invisibly. I am cold, rinsed by nausea . . . Grace runs away from me, runs out of my body like liquid from a corpse.

She maintains,throughout her life, a firm belief in ghosts, spirits, and thingsunseen. Whatever one may think of this as an idea about reality, itis a wonderfully irrefutable way to insist on emotional realitiesthat everyone else is maintaining do not exist. “Truth,” Manteldecides at 16, “is squalid and full of blots, and you can only findit in the accumulation of dusty and broken facts, in the cellars andsewers of the human mind. History’s what people are trying to hidefrom you, not what they’re trying to show you. You search for it inthe same way you sift through a landfill: for evidence of what peoplewant to bury.”

Meanwhile, as Mantel gets older, graduates,begins studying law at the London School of Economics, and marriesyoung, her body, like an unquiet ghost itself, begins to trouble her.Misdiagnosed and drugged up like a mental patient, she staggersthrough much of her 20s until it is finally discovered that she hasendometriosis. At 27, apparently without her consent, she is given ahysterectomy, which doesn’t even fully fix the problem. She becomesquite thin and is in constant pain. Hormones are prescribed; now shebecomes quite fat and is still in pain. To this day, it seems, sheremains in a state of perpetual flux and some physical indeterminacy.“I was,” she writes, “[and am] unsure about how I am related tomy old self, or to myself from year to year. . . . I have been somauled by medical procedures, so sabotaged and made over, so thin andso fat, that sometimes I feel that each morning it is necessary towrite myself into being.”

It is this woman, this incommensurateand fluxy person, who at last and truly becomes a writer. During thecourse of one hellish round of steroids, she relates, “Bald,odd-shaped, deaf but not defeated, I sat down and wrote anotherbook.” And another after that, and another, and many more. Mantelis in her 50s now; this memoir, she says, is an attempt to “thinkabout what I have lost and what I have gained.” She is frankly,unapologetically haunted, comfortably settled at last with herhusband in an apartment in a converted lunatic asylum. If there is aghost she has given up, it is the ghost of normality, the imago of alife lived in one world, one self, one body only. She mourns herinability to have her own child, but she has hardly been singular orself-enclosed. On the contrary, she seems to have dwelling withinher, at any given time, multitudes. “We can be made foreign toourselves,” she writes, “suddenly, by illness, accident,misadventure, or hormonal caprice.” And, she might have added, bythe force of imagination, which cuts its own unpredictable path,changing the shapes of the lives through which it moves. The mediumis not an empty vessel but an artist, both impressed on by the worldand leaving impressions on it.

It can take such a long time tounderstand how to live. We scour fantasy and reality, this world andthe next, looking for clues. There are certain, satisfying ways inwhich Mantel is an old-fashioned girl, one who wants to find her truehome, and one for whom the world inevitably splits along genderlines. Men and women know different things and do different thingswith what they know. Her mediums, her soothsayers, her Cassandras aresimultaneously saints and monsters; they are in more than one sensesupernatural. As a theory of writing, Mantel’s vision of a porous,translucent world that is continually being urgently infused by otherworlds offers us a vision of an astonishingly florid and rigorousgenerativity. If Mantel’s heroines tend to find their bodies aprison, their minds are ferociously alive, and in several dimensionsat once. The imagination, particularly in its female incarnation, isnever exhausted, lacking, or fatally compromised; on the contrary, itis so crowded and noisy in there that a sensitive girl can hardlybreathe. Her hand cramps from trying to get it all down fast enough.As a politics, Mantel’s strategy is to vault right past thestill-contested terrain of the human to the rich rubbish heap ofwitches, bitches, fat girls, ecstatics, barren women, and crazyladies. She gathers up the women whom even other women won’t alwaysclaim and makes them into a kind of shock troops endowed withotherworldly power. Given the general state of things, even at thislate date, Mantel’s tactics, her politics of gleaning, of drapingthe despised in heroism and extraordinary giftedness, might be seen,simply, as a smart move.

Like many smart moves, though, Mantel’sclever drapery protects a tender being at the core. In one quietscene in Beyond Black, Alison stares out a car window at theindustrial landscape going past. She thinks,

The world beyond the glass is the world of masculine action. Everything she sees is what a man has built. But at each turnoff, each junction, women are waiting to know their fate. They are looking deep inside themselves, into their private hearts, where the foetus forms and buds, where the shape forms inside the crystal, where fingernails click softly on the backs of the cards, and pictures flutter upwards, towards the air: Justice, Temperance, The Sun, The Moon, The World. <

Stacey D'Erasmo is the author of the novels Tea, a New York Times notable book of the year; and A Seahorse Year, a San Francisco Chronicle and Newsday best book of the year, and the winner of the 2004 Ferro-Grumley Award. She will be a writer-in-residence at Eugene Lang College at New School University in 2005–2006.

Originally published in the summer 2005 issue of Boston Review