Psychic Energies

BEYOND BLACK

By Hilary Mantel. Henry Holt. 365 pp. $26

Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black is an acquired taste, and I have acquired it. The novel is original and deeply dark, but as one interpretation of its title suggests, the author tries hard to push herself past the stark grimness of the world she describes and take the reader somewhere new and compelling.

The book explores the relationship between a genuine-article psychic named Alison and her assistant, Colette, as they travel through England, along with Alison's spirit guide, a lowlife figure from the past called Morris, who is forever sprawled in doorways and lounging on chairs, playing with his genitals or muttering. The obese, tormented Alison and the singularly repellent Morris are characters who (as you might expect) can be hard to take and (as you might not) still harder to turn away from.

Mantel sets them into relief by including the lost Colette, who enters Alison's oddball orbit fresh from a failed marriage. Colette loosely represents the "normal" world of ordinary human unhappiness and disappointment. About her and her husband Gavin, Mantel writes: "They got married. People did. It was the tag end of the Thatcher/Major years and people held a wedding to show off. They didn't have friends, so they invited everybody they knew."

Mantel's indictments of English life are planted with shrewdness and subtlety. She is particularly adept at rendering Alison's onstage conversations with audience members whose desire for knowledge of the dead is equivalent only to their desire to be important: " 'Gill, you're the sort of woman -- well -- ' She gives a little laugh and a shake of her head -- 'well, you're a bit of a human dynamo. I mean that's how your friends describe you, isn't it? Always on the go, morning, noon and night, you're the sort of person, am I right, who can keep all the plates spinning? But if there's one thing, if there's one thing, you know, all your friends say, it's that you don't give enough time to yourself.' . . . Gillian has of course been nodding since the first time Al paused for breath. In Alison's experience there's not a woman alive who, once past her youth, doesn't recognize this as a true and fair assessment of her character and potential." Alison's audience also longs for a sunny view of the afterlife, which has to be better than what they're living in now: "In Spirit World, she said, people were healthy and in their prime. 'They've all got their bits and whatsits. Whenever they were at their happiest, whenever they were at their healthiest, that's how you'll find them in Spirit World.' " There's piquant irony in her description, for no one in this book is particularly happy or healthy; the entire novel has a dissolute, seedy quality that Mantel works hard to attain. Some people here are about to die; they don't know it yet, but Alison does. Here, memorably, she foresees the imminent death of Princess Diana:

" 'It's Diana,' Al said. 'Dead.' . . .

" 'Suicide?'

" 'Or accident. She won't tell me. Teasing to the last.' . . .

" 'I'm sure it will be clearer,' Al said, 'when it actually happens.'