Psychic Energies

" 'What do you mean? You mean it hasn't happened yet?. . . Al, we must do something!'

" 'Like?'

" 'Warn somebody! Call the police! Telephone the queen?'

"Al raised a hand. 'Quiet, please. She's getting in the car. She's putting her seat belt -- no, no, she isn't.' "

Alison plays the "abnormal" to Colette's "normal," or at any rate the "paranormal." She is a complicated figure, rendered both powerful and forlorn by her natural and overwhelming gifts. Beside her, Colette appears vaguer and more generic, and the marriage that the assistant has escaped from has the gritty, mumbled cadences of a BBC TV show.

Most vivid are the impressionistic details of Alison's childhood, which was a Gothic horror show of grotesquerie and abuse. Alison's psychic gifts were already on display when she was young, but in her adulthood they serve as a durable outlet for the various traumas she experienced. I'm reminded of multiple-personality disorder, in which survivors of sexual abuse sometimes create fully fleshed-out characters inside themselves -- complete with names, distinct preferences and entire histories -- as a way to compensate for the burden of carrying around their own unbearable cargo of suffering. Like all good writers, Mantel understands that experience changes people, and terrible experience changes people terribly. Trauma, she tells us, doesn't just go away but is absorbed into the fabric of the self, either destroying it or becoming expelled from the psyche in some creative, shocking way.

Beyond Black is a daring and extravagant book, filled with as much wit as darkness. Sometimes, wit can't really replace light, and I found myself longing once in a while for the novel to take a sudden sharp turn and leave the paranormal and the traumatic far, far behind. I never got my wish, of course, which is probably just as well. Mantel's books are boldly different from one another; her novels have taken place among missionaries returning from Africa, in France during the Revolution, and in present-day Saudi Arabia. This, her 10th, is expansive and ambitious. It is not an entirely loveable novel, nor does it seem to aspire to be. She reminds me a little of an English Margaret Atwood, going anywhere and everywhere she likes as a writer, while never losing her finely honed sensibility and ear for the way people really talk to each other.

Contemporary American audiences remain captivated by TV psychic John Edward and his ilk, indulging him as he "struggles" to pull a name of a dead loved one from the air, recount a trip, or describe a lost trinket. His admirers, like people the world over, want to believe in something beyond the very ordinary confines of their lives. Readers of fiction want something different: They long for writers to pull fully formed characters from the air and animate them, to dredge up entire histories and futures with a conjurer's panache. They will be satisfied by Hilary Mantel's abilities to perform these feats, and to imbue her writing with a unique combination of exhilaration and dread. With Beyond Black , she shows us how fiction can lift us into the extraordinary. ·

Meg Wolitzer is a novelist whose book "The Position" has recently been published.