Backlisted - Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel

Episode Date: January 28, 2018

Critic and editor of Boundless Arifa Akbar joins John and Andy to discuss Hilary Mantel's tale of mediums and malevolence in the M25 corridor, Beyond Black. Tony White's 'The Fountain in the Forest' and 'Mothers' by Chris Power are the books we've been reading this week.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)4'49 - The Fountain in the Forest by Tony White10'55 - Mothers by Chris Power18'34 - Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. On New Year's Eve, we watched, following the brilliant suggestion from a stranger on Twitter, said, if you start watching this film at 9.58pm and 11 seconds, wait, if you start watching The Apartment,

Billy Wilder's The Apartment, at 9.58pm and 11 seconds, they will start singing Auld Lang Syne at midnight. So we did it, and it was brilliant. It's one of my favourite films, but I'd never done it. And then Jonathan Coe said there was a screening in the late 70s on BBC Two of Sunset Boulevard, which started at like 10.40pm, and sure enough, there's a New Year's Eve party scene hit at midnight.

So clearly someone back then had gone, you know, this would be a good wheeze. So that was good. Anyway. Hello and welcome to Backlisted. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. You join us in the dressing room of a municipal concert hall somewhere in the Thames Valley,

waiting for a sign from our sponsors, Unbound, the website which brings dead authors and live readers together. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And joining us today is Aretha Akbar. Hello. Hello. Welcome to Backlisted.

And Aretha is formerly Literary Editor at The Independent. Aretha is now the editor of Boundless, Unbound's online magazine. Is that keeping you busy? It's making me slightly smug. It turns out it really is as good as we hoped and said and thought. And it has been incredibly hard work. It's only five weeks. But it looks beautiful.

This is me blowing my own trumpet. But I feel I should because it's really a beautiful site. But some of the essays have surprised me me they've sort of brought a lump to my throat and sort of made me cry a bit or made me think. Ella Fitzgerald, Ellie Smith was one of the best things I've read in a long long time. Just beautiful and I was communicating with her and she was really sick in bed and then she filed this exquisite piece about Ella Fitzgerald through her playlist 12 songs making a sort of mosaic of her life, her biography. It was a really cute way to do it, and she did it exquisitely as ever, very whimsically.

So we had that, but we've had our very own Dan Kieran writing about Prince in a very moving way. We've had Amanda Craig reviewing Philip Pullman. We've had a number of writers that I love. Is Boundless published on a kind of rolling basis, or do you publish every two weeks? We publish an essay a day, every weekday. So we've got something new every day. And the beauty of this is it's really eclectic.

So one day you might get an essay on the politics of menstruation. And the next day you get something highly literary. And the next day you get something about having creative writing workshops in the Shetila refugee camp in Lebanon. You never know what you're getting. So we mix it up a lot. What I love is give somebody like Ali Smith a chance to write on something that she wouldn't normally write on yeah so that's that's and she flies with it and I've commissioned I commissioned Ali Smith to write for us at the Independent and she could do a maximum of however many thousand words where she could you know and she she just she kept it to a

thousand words or 1,200 words there but she could really let go of you. I know, and I loved Preti Teneja last week, I mean, a wonderful novelist, but wrote a wonderful thing about how fiction appropriates classical myth. I mean, it's been, it's a lovely thing, it's just every day there's something that's a little bit, I mean, totally not driven by any agenda either, which is what I love about it. Yes, well, arising out of this, talking about challenging and something that, I mean, I think is deeply subversive,

but also weirdly, I mean, there's nothing, this book that you're talking about today, that we're talking about today, Beyond Black by Hiram Motel, I think is the most, is the oddest, most subversive, but apparently most familiar subject matter of any modern novel i know we're going to talk about that in a moment but before we talk about that we're going to talk andy yes what what have you what have you been reading in your holiday speaking well speaking of experimental uh fiction I read a novel by

Tony White, the novelist Tony White called The Fountain in the Forest and this is published by Faber and Faber and I read it because a few months ago our estranged former colleague Matthew Clayton and that's a joke, he's not really estranged

I saw him five minutes ago and he's unestranged to me. He's unestranged. But he said to me, I think you would read... I've just read this book that I absolutely love, Tony White's new novel, I think you'd absolutely love it. And so I was reading that and it is absolutely terrific. And if you're a regular listener to Backlisted,

there's a couple of reasons why I think it would appeal to you. One aspect of this novel is it's a police procedural novel set in London and it's very reminiscent of Derek Raymond and Derek Raymond's Factory series, starting with He Died With His Eyes Open. It is clearly with I Was Dora Suarez.

Actually, no, that's not true. It doesn't end with I Was Dora Suarez. There's another one after that, the title of which now escapes me. So it's very much in that there's a particularly gruesome murder. There's an account of a London policeman who operates within the law, but perhaps without law as well. And so there's that element of it. It's a fantastic London novel, a book about London, London as it is now, London as it was 40 years ago. Not for nothing does it have a quote from Michael Moorcock on the front,

author of Mother London, amongst other things. And Michael Moorcock says, rejecting familiar influences of the past 20 years, White joins a handful of contemporary writers to approve that the novel has never been more alive. He's a serious, engaging voice of the modern city. So it's a fantastic book about London as it is fantastic book about about london as it is now and how it got to be like it is now but it's also it's quite a difficult book to talk about because i don't want to give too much away but it is also inspired by ulipo by the uh the movement co-founded by Raymond Queneau. So it's like a cross between Derek Raymond and Raymond Queneau.

And the idea with Ulipo was that you would write fiction under a constraint. You would devise a constraint for yourself. Most famously, Perec's novel La Disparition, published over here as A Void by Harville, which is a novel entirely written without recourse to the letter E. Brilliant. Translation by Gilbert Heddaire. By Gilbert Heddaire, right. And so Tony has given himself the constraint,

a constraint which he then doesn't reveal to you until the end of the novel. So I don't want to say what it is to people. But it is perfect, John John because when you're reading the book you won't you probably won't be able to work out what it is and then when you get to the end of the book and Tony reveals

what it is it suddenly seems totally central to the structure of the novel it's not just like a nice idea, but it totally integrates with what the book is trying to do. And finally, and this I think is...

I'm not going to read anything from it because I would rather just try and say what the two things were that I really, really liked about the book. The first one is it's set in... mostly set in London, in the here and now, in a village commune in France in the 1980s and at the Battle of the Beanfield at Stonehenge later in the 1980s. And it moves around between those three time zones.

And what the book does brilliantly is it connects social and political developments, which seem on the surface to have little to do with one another, in a way that indicates that something that happened in a field near Stonehenge in the mid-1980s impacts on life in London in 2017 in a way that no-one could have foreseen, but you can trace a direct line back. And the other thing that it does,

and for me this is the thing I like most about the book, and I'm struggling to think of another novel that does this in quite this way, it gives you a protagonist in different contexts and at different points in their life and asks you the reader to repeatedly try and work out how much you approve or disapprove of their actions so what the character what the protagonist is doing at one point in their life at one point in the book you'll be rooting for them and at another point you'll be thinking no that's not, that's that's an antagonistic

thing to do, don't do that and he's constantly asking you to switch sympathies between this one character I it seems to be and can be enjoyed at the level of a thriller.

And yet it does all these other fascinating things, and best of all, it's the first in a trilogy. So you can read, by the time you end, you get to volume one, you think, oh, great, he's sat up, all these things, all these hairs are racing now. All these things are going to come back and visit this character, not just in the now, but at other points where you haven't yet encountered him. It's such a good book.

See, I feel I know what this book's about without having read it, because I've just read an essay on it. I hate to do a product placement thing here, but we've got an essay in a couple of weeks on Ulupu and this book and this author, so I can't wait to read it. It's proper.

It does sound proper. And I'm not reading it, because actually, again, wait to read it. It's proper. It does sound... And I'm not reading it because actually, again, let Tony do it. I'm just saying, read the book and let Tony do the work for you. But all these interesting narrative and intellectual games being played. So, John, that's what I was reading. What have you been reading? I have read a... I've been reading a lot of collections of short stories recently, as you know.

Many of them by women, but this not by a woman, by a man. Chris Power. Also, I have to say, from Faber and Faber, and, you know, chapeau, Faber and Faber, because I feel they are, you know, traditionally one of the great forces of original fiction in this country. And Tony White and now this, I think are...

I mean, this to me... And yes, also, can I just say, and Faber published... Pachico. The Lucky Ones by Julian Pachico, which was one of my favourite books last year. And I'm not going to get drawn into the, I think, generally not helpful discussions about the failings of literary fiction. Literary fiction has been failing.

I've been in the book trade for 30 years, and that conversation has always been the same. There are periods when it seems to be doing better. But generally, the truth is, first novels, difficult, interesting, challenging work, very few of them are rewarded by the sales that they deserve. Well, I hope that Chris Power's book will be read. It's called Mothers. It is, to me, it's really interesting formally, because it's a collection of short stories.

But there are three stories, the beginning, the middle and the end, which have essentially the same. The narrative arc of the whole book tells the story of one woman and her husband and their relationship and particularly her relationship with her mother. becomes a mother it is a fat it is not a slim collection this is 300 page short story collection this is this is i mean i if i were you know max say what i would have probably called this a novel because what happens in between those three kind of straining posts are wonderfully tangential stories which somehow reflect on the main theme. I mean, if I'm going to cut to the chase, this is the best, most accurate, most moving presentation of depression I have ever read in literature.

I mean, it's cumulative force because it doesn't it's there's nothing flashy about this book it just builds up a kind of it builds up the almost the sort of credibility to be able to talk about the untalkable which is what happens when somebody kind of can't deal with their lives and goes off the rails disappears travels can't deal with the the the the relationships in their lives and i guess the the other stories in the books stories from childhood stories there's an amazing story in here about a rodney dangerfield i was going to say it's on the back cover here stand up with rice's blocking box for his last so i mean i could easily have read i'm going to read a a tiny little bit from one of the earlier stories,

but I could have easily read from that bit that Rodney Dangerfield impersonator who has Reuters blocked, who could only express himself through somebody else's creativity. And it is, oh God, it's so painful. He ends up playing kind of frat boy sort of gigs. Rodney Dangerfield is sort of an alternative US comedian, beloved by, you know, kind of cool, but also, you know, not Woody Allen, let's be honest. And he has to put on his ridiculous makeup

and does do this ridiculous routine. And he ends up being, having the shit beaten out of him by a drunken and the guy's 21st birthday party the guy whose party is ends up beating him up because he's not roger ronnie dangerfield but he has in the moment of his most deepest humiliation he suddenly the donna for what his own work might be comes so it is of course like a lot of story collections it's a it's a book about writing but it is it is about it's as good as anything about the disconnection between couples there's an amazing story about a couple who are out walking um and and and they uh she wants to

cross a stream and the boyfriend doesn't want to cross a stream and they end up going to a hotel and she doesn't really forgive the boyfriend for having been so pusillanimous. But the main arc, which is a small girl... Good word. A small girl, a small girl, a small girl, dysfunctional, mother dies when she's young and then it goes right through to the end,

I won't give you, but it's, to me, it's a novel. I'll read you this little, it's an amazing, one of the three bits of the mother one, two, and three in the story is about Eva, Eva, who is Scandinavian. And she decides that she's going to travel through Europe with a guidebook randomly. Behind the lighthouse, in a hollow that shelters it from the worst of the wind, is an outdoor cafe.

People are sitting in couples, trios and quartets at its trestle tables. She finds an empty table and orders a beer and a plate of squid from a waiter with drooping eyes like a bloodhound's. She looks back along the length of her walk and to the north, beyond the cafe where the Pyrenees end. The sky

is a high greyish blue. There are clouds out to sea. She finishes eating and lights a cigarette. She orders an espresso and takes out her guidebook, a tattered brick that covers all of Europe. It is old. It belonged to her mother and has grown soft as a phone book from use. The pages are loose and she's lost several regions in transit. Because of its age, it is almost worthless as a source of information. Disconnected telephone numbers, inaccurate maps, descriptions of restaurants and bars that closed down long ago. Nevertheless, its contents fascinate Eva.

Opening it at random, the way she has done since she was a little girl, she finds herself in the Baltic. It has three gulfs, she reads. Bosnia, Finland and Riga. She looks at the map. The sea, light grey. The land, dark grey. The sun is at its peak.

She lights another cigarette and flips the book's pages, their movements stirring the silver-grey flakes in the ashtray. She is somewhere in the Carpathians. She is in Provence. She is in Innsbruck. It is one of the pages that the book likes is in Provence. She is in Innsbruck. It is one of the pages that the book likes to fall open to as if prompting her. She looks at a black and white picture of grand old buildings lining a square festooned with sun umbrellas.

Above the square looms a vast wall of wrinkled rock. And that kind of goes on. This is where her reverie breaks down. She's not sure who or what she's waiting for. The caption beneath the picture says, Innsbruck, the sophisticated capital of the Alps. She reads the brief description of the city, only half paying attention to words she's read many times before. Her fingers move across the map of Austria,

tracing the thin, crooked lines of its rivers. It's just, it's melancholic, but it is the cumulative effect of it. I kind of started thinking, yeah, it's melancholic, but it is the cumulative effect of it. I kind of started thinking, yeah, it's good. And then by the end, I think it is one of the, I think it is a really, really extraordinary. It's a really interesting book. It's good to also, can I say, to give the lie to the idea that the only good books published in September. Totally. idea that only the only good books published in september totally we just talked about two things which we think are both fascinating and original and challenging and and and i can't publish in

january i can't i can't give this i can't give this more now here are our sponsors telling you what to do the subject of plot is relevant to the book that we're here to talk about today, which is Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel. Now, we're not going to spend as much time on this episode discussing Hilary Mantel because I'm assuming that lots of people who listen to Backlisted will know who Hilary Mantel is. But Beyond Black is not the best known of her novels. Aretha, when did you first read Beyond Black? So I first quarter read it soon after, it was about 2006, I reckon.

And it was one of those books that wasn't recommended to me. It's a blank how I came to buy it who knows why I bought it but I maybe it was on a whimsy and I went into wherever I went into and bought it and I must have read the back of it and thought I fancy this and I took it home and I read a quarter of it and it terrified me and I stopped reading it and I thought um it didn't give me nightmares but I just thought this is the kind of dangerous book that I don't want to continue reading and the reason why is this I love frightening ghost stories I love M.R. James I you know I love all of the baroque stuff the macabre stuff what I'm not so comfortable with is social realism with ghosts and added to it and the reason that is is because it's your world you know it's the m4 it's your back garden

and beyond black had that it was completely ordinary suburban life, small lives in a way, quiet back streets, the retail park, and then these figures appear in those places. So that frightened me quite a lot. It sort of, it's those, I, it reminds me of another book that I found terrifying for the same reason. It's Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger. And there will always be a scene which will frighten me to death because... And it's silly when I... I'm going to explain it to you and it's going to sound silly. And it's when one of the characters is looking at a mirror. And looking at a mirror and looking at a mirror.

And then suddenly the mirror starts walking towards her. And why that... I think I threw down the book at that point, Little Stranger. I thought, I hate this book, I'm going to stop it now. Because, you know, that could happen to my mirror. It's this sort of invasion of another world into your home. It's not... So Beyond Black I stopped reading because it's not the haunted house story

it's it's the ordinary house with hauntings living in it sitting on your sofa it's one of the things one of the things that's so good about it i think is it manages to well we'll come on to talk about this but that suburban environment it manages to suggest that beneath the concrete something much stranger is oozing and trying to break its way through all the time you know that but that absolutely but it's even more profound than that because i mean the premise of this book is so terrifying that there is no outside. You suddenly realise that the thing you think is, well, it'll all be fine when we die. That's an end.

That's the final narrative. And then there's peace and rest. But this book actually posits that, no, it's like that's just... I mean, the terrifying claustrophobia. So we all know books of suburban claustrophobia, but the claustrophobia of this book is that bad things that happen don't stop after you die. The repercussions of our actions do not stop after we die,

that we never escape from the things that go wrong in our lives. I often wondered, I read it probably like you, I don't know, 10 years ago, and loved it, and I thought, I think Hilly Mantel is a genius, and I read quite a few of her other books, but not, weirdly, the ones that she became famous for. And then she was a bit like, for me, a few of her other books but not weirdly the ones that she became famous for and then she was a bit like for me a sort of Louis de Bernier you think this person's so good why is she not winning prizes and you realize with this book which we've sort of stirred up a bit of a hornet's nest on twitter today and I was talking to Jenny Colgan about it it's just people can't

this is dark well as I as I said earlier there are two types of people in the world those who love beyond black and those who are entitled to their wrong opinion endearing to myself to people but you know agree with that and I kind of find that the people that don't like this book are really literal minded people and they're the sort of i'm afraid they're the sort of people that probably um wouldn't get on with life i really feel wow we're saying that let me just let me just intervene to say and we're saying that as a mark of a reef as passion rather than her passing judgment on you know anyone who's listening but um this book

i feel very very i feel a very personal thing about this book which is when i read it for a long time i felt that books novels were written out of a sort of literary perception of life and they were to do with you know big themes and i mean not that any of that was a problem but i felt that my life shitty greasy back gardens with decaying paper bags horrible estates with idiots and nasty houses and i just felt that there's sort of the whole the actual content of my life, nobody had ever written about accurately, let alone turned it into what I think this is, which is a magnificent work of art. And then when I read this book,

I thought all of this stuff that I sort of, in some part of my, why does nobody ever write about this? Why does nobody ever write about the shitty cul-de-sacs? does nobody write about the terrible and the stuff i mean we're about these horrible i mean there's a i'll read a bit in a minute about about the the fig and pheasant you know these hotel which i've worked in you know in bars and you think who comes here who whose life who has their wedding reception in a shithole like this? Well, we've said this...

And that's what this book is better than any book I've ever read at Capture. We've said this before, but when we were doing... Or I've talked about this before. When we were doing our Croydon Till I Die gigs, and we would ask the audience, name me a great novel set in the suburbs. And the truth of it is, there are very few. Most novels are set in the city or the country right

and this could be the greatest this is the greatest novel set in 21st century suburban britain england utterly relentless it is it is not a trace of sentimentality in this but aretha you mentioned the little stranger it's very interesting to me that you mentioned little stranger that is my favorite of sarah wal Little Stranger. That is my favourite of Sarah Waters' novels, right? Beyond Black is my favourite of Hilary Mantel's novels, and yet I am well aware that there is a strong, intelligent set of voices in the case of both those novels and novelists who see these novels as aberrations in their otherwise solid careers. So lots of people who are regular readers of Sarah Waters' work, The Little Stranger is their least favourite of her books.

Because it was her one-go story. Yes, and Beyond Black similarly seems to elicit very strong responses from readers for or against. And in a way, our panel here today is not representative because we all think this book is self-evidently a masterpiece so I find it quite difficult to get into the head of somebody who thinks but no it doesn't work or it's boring or yeah but within within the chronology of her books it's it's not an aberration her first novel um

every day is Mother's Day, was about a mother and daughter, this connection between mother and daughter. I feel Beyond Back is really about mother and daughter and origins and where we come from and mothers and what they do to us and the damage of childhood, but the ambiguous, extremely powerful love towards dysfunctional, damaged mothers. And Hilary Mantel has written about suburbia again and again.

I know she's also written magnificent historical fiction, but this is very much in keeping with the best of her work. Just because we know her from those two Man Booker-winning, astonishing historical novels doesn't mean that she can't do this very well. What I think she does with suburbia slightly make it completely original to us. So how I've read and consumed suburbia in literary fiction is, God, it's boring. God, it's soulless. This is what suburbia, being on

the fringes of metropolitan identity and life, can do to you. It leaves you on the fringes of metropolitan identity and life can do to you. It leaves you on the fringes of life as an outsider, a suburban outsider. But she is giving suburbia, this rottenness that you talk about, John, a kind of depth, a life and depth. So right, so right, yeah. What it is that's so dark and brilliant about it is that the veneer so alison hart the psychic we haven't really talked about what the book is but the book is about a medium a medium um you

know it so there's a sort of jokey veneer which is i mean it's brilliantly done you know it's a sort of mr memory act she goes and she does that thing and she... But you get the sense, and we'll talk about this more, that actually the narrative doesn't make fun of the act. And the narrative... And we're going to go on to this because of what Hilary Mantel and her own life. But what you get is

that what she is is this sort of large, blousy, scented... She wears these opals she's this incredibly apparently almost she's sort of too maybe too big to be sexy but she's what she is is kind and warm and generous and and yet the horror the utter which, I mean, just in terms of the way this book is structured, the horror of her childhood and the squalor. This is not suburbia. So what Mantel is almost saying is that suburbia is this sort of like, and I know this, I know this from, this is the history of the 20th century. People who were in 19th century squalor who got moved into suburb suburbia council estates this is and yet you can never quite forget that that the you know the stuff that you're escaping from

that's what makes this book i mean it's people who read this book for plot are probably going to be for plot are probably going to be disappointed because that's I would say that and yet I wonder about that I think it's got a great plot I don't even think ok so listen

before we go any further Aretha is going to read for us in a moment something I hope we've got some clips of Hilary Mansfield I found yesterday an interview from 2005 when this book was published with Eleanor Wachtel for the CBC show Writers & Company. And unusually for an hour-long interview,

this is an interview that talks for ten minutes about the new novel and then goes through the highlights of the career. This is an hour about Beyond Black. If you like this novel, if you are a listener who likes this novel, seek out this CBC interview from 2005. It's online with Hilary Mantel. We're going to listen to two or three clips from it. Here's the first now. It's relevant to what John was just talking about.

When I look at where I live, which is about 25 miles outside London, in a dormitory settlement, a commuter town. It's the kind of place where nobody really comes from. And the link between our landscape and our memory has been cut. And I think that the psychic business and businesses booming is driven by a similar imperative. Who am I, and where do I fit? Where do I fit in this landscape? And where do I fit in the pattern of the universe? People have so much lost their roots, lost their families, and again, I think there's a pervasive fear of feeling that

people's lives are out of their own control. I'm very struck by the sense that if people do form any sense of the collective, it's usually in some ugly way it's usually a moral panic let us all stand together against the asylum seekers let's define us against the immigrants and that was 2005 amazing i mean amazing that that made the hairs on my arm stand up on them when i heard that yesterday anyway aretha you were going to read us something. It's only a short passage and it's the first time we see Alison or Al, as she's called throughout the book,

do her stuff on stage. The entire novel is about Alison being a medium and forming a bit of a peculiar but quite an intense friendship

with another outsider kind of woman called Colette and so they become Colette becomes her assistant and this is this is Alison going on stage a manager yes exactly she corrects that when she's called the assistant she walked

out into the light. The light, she would say, is where we come from, and it's to the light we return. Through the hall ran small detonations of applause, which she acknowledged only with a sweep of her thick lashes. She walked slowly right to the front of the stage, to the taped line, her head turned, her eyes searched against the dazzle.

Then she spoke in her special platform voice. This young lady, she was looking through Rose's back, this lady here, your name is? Well, Leanne, I think I have a message for you. Colette released her breath from the tight space where she held it. Alone, spotlit, perspiringly slight, Alison looked down at her audience. Her voice was low, sweet and confident, and her aura was a perfectly adjusted aquamarine, floating like a silk shawl around her shoulders and upper arms. Now, Lee, I want you to sit back in your seat,

take a deep breath and relax. And that goes for all of you. Put your happy faces on. You're not going to see anything that will frighten you. I won't be going into a trance and you won't be seeing spooks or hearing spirit music. She looked around, smiling, taking in the rose. So why don't you all sit back and enjoy the evening? All I do is I just tune in. I just listen hard and decide who's out there. Now if I get a message for you please raise your hand, shout up because if you don't it's very frustrating for the spirits trying to come through. Don't be shy, you just shout up or give me a wave. Then my helpers will rush over to you with the microphone. Don't be afraid of it when it comes to you just hold it steady and speak up one of the things that i remember when i first read this book

which i absolutely loved about it was the idea that for allison she does have second sight she is surrounded by spirits but yet in order to go out and make a living and be a medium in that context she also has to have access to a load of other skills which are nothing to do with the spirit world so what she tells people might or might not be based on what she can see and i i i it reminded the the comparison funnily enough we've talked about this book before, but the comparison for me was with the description of wrestling in the wrestling. You know, is it real?

Is wrestling fixed? Well, it is fixed, but guess what? It also hurts. It's both the things simultaneously. Exactly. I mean, I think the thing that is, this is not, what's so interesting, we'll come on to it again, that she's not using this as some sort of metaphorical sort of structure in order to tell some kind of clever story. genuine, this novel is a genuine attempt to understand the complexity of consciousness and of

our place, it is when she says our place in the universe, this is Hilary Mantel is Alison and Colette are as richly detailed and imagined as any characters in literature I think they are and their relationship is so

complicated. And complicated relationship is so complicated. And complicated. And she never takes the easy path with their relationship. It's the opposite of a Buzzy movie. They don't fall in love with one another. They fall out with one another. Can I read the blurb on this? Yeah, go ahead.

I think that is a beautiful... The tarot card cover is great. It's beautiful. And that, I think, is not. But The tarot card cover is great. It's beautiful, and that I think is not. But this is the problem with literary fiction. In one paragraph, ladies and gentlemen, Alison Hart, a medium by trade, tours the commuter belt of London with her flint-hearted sidekick, Colette,

passing on messages from dead ancestors. But behind her plump smiling persona is a desperate woman. Well, no. Actually, no. The next life holds terrors that she must conceal from her clients and her own waking hours are plagued by the spirits of men from her past.

They infiltrate her house, her body and her soul and the more she tries to be rid of them the stronger and nastier they become. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Not bad. I think that's not bad, actually, John. I think that's not... You know, you're trying to boil down a complicated book

into a paragraph that gets people to buy it. What you're trying to do is to sell something that is really, really, really difficult to explain. Let's just... Sorry, Aretha. Another bit of Hillary. OK. Let's just hear...

This is a clip of the idea about, I suppose whether you would say, should we believe in ghosts? Should we believe in spiritualism? Scepticism is actually not as clean as it sounds. And I think a lot of the trouble is that sceptics say it doesn't stand up as a science. Well, of course it doesn't, but their music doesn't stand up as a science. It's not a science, it's an art. And I think in some circumstances it's a healing art.

I think it certainly does a job of consolation sometimes but trying to work out whether it's true or false probably to make a better analogy it's like trying to work out whether psychotherapy is true or false it's not really the question the question is, is it useful? is it exploitative? is it manipulative?

And what are people's motives for engaging in it? Well, one of the interesting things to know about Hilary Mantel is that she grew up in a house where her family knew there were ghosts in the home. So, you know, take note of the word knew rather than believed that there were and in my fantastic um paperback copy of the book there's an interview there's a series of interviews that took between her and others and in it she says when i was a child i believed our house was haunted and so worryingly did the grown-ups i I was often very frightened, and the imprint of that fear stays with me, but I try to use it constructively now. So there's layers of the ghost story here.

So on the one hand, I think how Hilary Mantel makes the unbelievable believable and just works with the assumption that what Al is seeing is there and true is because Hilary Mantel herself believes it's true, that these fiends, that the spirit guides and all the rest of the things, the people from the dead that Al sees, they're just there and it's real. So there's that layer of the ghost story. But I also think in what Al does on stage is akin to sort of what Shirley Jackson said of, you know, her interest in terror and occult, as she said, was a way of embracing and channelling female power at a time when women in America

often had little control over their lives. And what I think Al is doing is giving people narratives uh shaping lives and in a way it's about i think the book is about and the ghosts are about our pasts our grandparents our dead mothers and fathers where we've come from who those people were where we from, is one of the most essential questions of this book, I think. And another layer is the fact that this book is not really about ghosts, but about the past that will never leave us, the damage of our past, the damaged part of our past that continues to linger in our present. In a 2005 interview, review that Faye Weldon reviewed this book,

just when it had come out, and she said, this is a book out of the unconscious where the best novels come from. This is a book out of the unconscious. It's this thing that we take the past with us, especially the trauma of the past. And, you know, the abuse here reminded me a little bit of Hanya Yanagihara's last book, this immense book, A Little Life. And it was another very divisive book. Another very divisive. Between people who absolutely loved it and people who couldn't stand it. And it was about a man, a very successful man as an adult,

who was badly abused, sexually abused, ritualistically sexually abused in his childhood. However distant he becomes from that childhood, however powerful and impressive and achieving he becomes in the world, that past is a haunting and he's eventually defeated by it. And she's written another version, except that haunting is literal. Those men, the fiends that Alison is haunted by, were actually men in her childhood,

in that terrible, abusive childhood home. And that's what's so moving about the book, because her persona is she's always trying to do good actions. She's always trying to do good actions. She's always trying, she's trying to pull good out of the, and her mother, who is this sort of demonic character, it's just a brilliant thing. Why did you not take your mother's name? Her mother's called Emmeline Cheetham,

and she says to Colette, well, go figure. But it's just a lovely little book, which is, there are things you need to know. This is obviously Ali Al, in a way, talking to herself. There are things you need to know about the dead, she wanted to say.

Things you really ought to know. For instance, it's no good trying to enlist them for any good cause you have in mind, world peace or whatever, because they'll only bug you about. They're not reliable. They'll pull the rug from under you. They don't become decent people just because they'll only bug you about. They're not reliable. They'll pull the rug from under you.

They don't become decent people just because they're dead. People are right to be afraid of ghosts. If you get people who are bad in life, I mean cruel people, dangerous people, why do you think they're going to be any better after they're dead? But she would never speak it, never. Never utter the word death if she could help it. And even though they needed frightening,

even though they deserved frightening, she would never when she was with her clients, slip a hint or tip a wink about the true nature of the place beyond black. Oh, that's so good. I mean, that is the kind of... Come on, people who don't like this book, listening to this.

What's the matter with you? Come on. I love the paradox of her ghost. So the apparitions, the ghosts, people who don't like this book listening to this what's the matter with you like it come on i love the paradox of her ghost so the the the the apparitions the ghosts that she sees are these people that are actually very like corporeal beings they they burp they swear they're not changed at all they're not these ethereal beings they play with their genitals did you not think did you not think do youy Pete. Did you think... I had a moment, I thought, George Saunders obviously must have read this book.

There is a lot of link in the book. Yeah, yeah, I agree with that. You know, it's worth saying about this book that this is Hilary Mantel's ninth novel. It was published in 2005 and her previous novel was called The Giant O'Brien and that was published in 1998.

So between The Giant O'Brien and Beyond Black seven years, she published a book of short stories called Learning to Talk and a memoir called Giving Up the Ghost. And she quite explicitly has said about Giving Up the Ghost and Beyond Black that having revisited traumatic events in a memoir in Giving Up the Ghost,

she then wanted to go back and deal with them again in fiction. And so Beyond Black is an attempt to go back over the territory, but almost what had been raised by the memoir is then being processed in the novel. She says in that interview at the end that we've been listening to, she says, I've got an idea for what I want to do next, but this is like the end of something. This novel is like the end of a cycle in my writing and what I want to go on and do next is something different.

Isn't that interesting? And that next novel is Wolf Hall, four years later. So you can see... Now, I always used to think about Hilary Mantel, and it is said of Hilary Mantel that she never writes the same book twice, that she's a novelist who was difficult to sell because she'd write a book about the French Revolution,

but then she'd write a book about a sensitive... Well, then she'd write a book called Flood I read Flood this week which is a great favourite of Sarah Perry the novelist Sarah Perry that's totally different that could have been written by a different writer entirely and yet as you say Aretha

actually looking back now at these 11 novels and 15 books she does come like all great novelists do back to the same subjects again, but try and find different ways to animate them. What's so interesting about Wolf Hall and

Bring Up the Bodies is they rely on an entirely different, I think, novelistic technique, and they're trying to achieve different results. And she's so good at both of them. She's such a good writer.

But there's a similar way in which the characters in Wolf Hall have conversations almost with their ancestors and people from the past. Yes, there is that, yes. I mean, it's slightly kind of ridiculous, but I was thinking the dickens who writes david copperfield and great expectations is sort of weirdly also the dickens that writes tale of two cities and um you know that you feel with mantel actually she's that kind of level of artist she's these this there's no doubt that Beyond Black and the memoir are kind of, they're from the darkest matter.

Yeah. Dredged up. Yeah, yeah. And yet she's able in the two Wolf Hall books to be a brilliantly, I mean, you know, you wouldn't know. You wouldn't know. I mean, I haven't read Wolf Hall. I read Wolf Hall last weekend. I know, which is great.

I'm reading Bring Up the Buddies right now. I have read some of Wolf Hall, but not all of it. And I've watched the TV. But I think, I don't think, I may be fascinated to know, could you back form Beyond Black from your reading of Wolf Hall? I'm not sure that you could. In the same way, I think if you read Tale of Two Cities, you wouldn't get great expectations necessarily.

But if you look back to a few years ago when she wrote Giving Up the Ghost, which is all about her life and upbringing, and you regard the fact that her father left when she was 11, her stepdad moved in, you kind of see the bad mother here, dramatised bad mother. You see the searching for the father, Al searching for her father. Al again and again says to her prostitute mother, who was my father, who is my father?

Her mother can't tell her. Her mother can't locate a father for her. And you can sort of see that in the memoir. And I know it's not a literal seeing, but it's a dark dramatisation of family origins, looking for parents. Colette realises her uncle is actually her father. There's fathers, missing fathers and mistaken identities for fathers.

If you want to, I've never read anything quite as... The fear that Morris, her spirit guide, with just a tiny little bit, if you want to sort of define unheimlich, the idea that there's something that is so wrong and so uncomfortable and so difficult. Ho, said Morris, you don't fry me, girl. 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 and opportune moments if you try scubbing floors i'll rise up splosh out of your bucket and a burst of black water causing you to get the sack then you'll be wheedling me around like you used to oh uncle morris have no spending money oh uncle morris have no money for school dinners i've no money for my school trip and all the time got me on my back with the same sob story to macarthur and whining for sweeties to keith too generous by half that's morris warren the day i was taken over there wasn't five bob in my pocket i was taken over and i don't know how taken over with money owing to me morris began to whimper and this is a little little nasty well so if you're trying to if you try to just how does the power how are we never ever to get away

from the past it's brilliant she kind of personifies that that the sticky horrible you can never get away you know wherever you're looking there he is little horrible little we've we've got one last um clip and the reason i found this fascinating is because she talks well you're here but she talks explicitly about the link between the main characters in the book and the the bigger picture she was trying to write about the medium was working really hard that night it was a man he was overweight he was perspiring he was breathing heavily he was going through the last hours of all these these unfortunate spirits and the audience sat there like a well like a basket of potatoes really they looked completely wooden he wasn't getting anything back I began to feel sorry for him and then he came to a young girl of about 17 and he said he had

a message from her grandmother but he couldn't quite get the name and you know he began is it Margaret is it Marjorie is it Mary I'm getting an M and she said to him she didn't know her grandmother's name and that really shocked me and at that point I began to be as much interested in the audiences as the psychics and then I saw that this theme really knitted into a Condition of England novel, so the whole project grew. Now, Condition of England novel, I'm going to read you my favourite paragraph from Beyond Black

and I'm addressing the listeners who love this book and listeners who are not so keen on this book. You know, one of the criticisms of this book is that it is sneering at suburbia. But I totally agree with what Aretha was saying, that it's not sneering, it is treating it with dispassionately and with depth. I will read you my favourite paragraph

and I would ask everyone listening to this, gathered at the table and, quote, at home, at home, imagine what Martin Amis would have done with this paragraph and then you'll see the difference in the approach. This is quite late in the book. The fig and pheasant, under a more dignified name had once been a coaching inn and its frontage was still spattered with the exudates of a narrow busy a

road in the 60s it had stood near derelict and drafty with a few down at heel regulars huddled into a corner of its cavernous rooms in the the 70s, it was bought out by a steakhouse chain and Tudorised, fitted with plywood oak-stained panels and those deep-buttoned settles covered in stain-proof plush, of which the Tudors were so fond. It offered the novelty of baked potatoes wrapped in foil with butter or sour cream and a choice of cod or haddock in breadcrumbs

accompanied by salad or greyish and lukewarm peas. With each decade, as its ownership had changed, experiments in theming had succeeded each other until its original menu had acquired retro chic and prawn cocktails had reappeared. Plus there was bruschetta, there was ricotta, there was a junior menu of pasta shapes and fish bites and tiny sausages like the finger that the witch tested for plumpness. There were dusty ruched curtains and vaguely William Morris wallpaper, washable but not proof against kids wiping their hands down it just as they did at home. in the sports bar where smoking was banned the ceilings were falsely yellowed to simulate years of tobacco poisoning it had been done 30 years ago and no one saw

reason to interfere with it now we and john had chosen listeners john had chosen the exact same passage. Because, for exactly the same reason, it's precise and it's funny, but it isn't taking the piss. It's saying this is the reality of the condition of England. That's great. You've got to read a piece now. Right, and I'm going to read a piece sort of leading on a sort of state-of-the-nation piece.

And if you begin to look at Hilary Mantel's work in combination, you can see it talking to each other. So I'm going to read a passage in which she talks about Princess Diana's death. And of course, if any... The thing is, it's ripe. It's brilliant comedy, isn't it, because all the psychics are like oh my god this is the big one this is the big one, are we going to channel Diana

and you know of course that passage to me talked to the essay monumental essay she wrote last year in the Guardian about on the 20th anniversary about Diana and she said for some people being dead is only a relative condition they reek more than the living do after their first rigor they reshape themselves take on a

flexibility in public discourse and of course that's what Princess Diana did for so many years but you know this was this was the terrifying premise of this book this is the yeah and and Diana in a way sort of manifests it and epitomises it. But a passage from the book, and this is the day of Diana's funeral. Colette's eyes were on the road. In the passenger seat, Alison twisted over her shoulder to look at Morris in the back, kicking his short legs and singing a medley of patriotic songs. As they passed a bridge, policemen's faces peered down at them, pink

sweating ovals above the sick glow of high-vis jackets. Stubble-headed boys, the type who, in normal times, heave a concrete block through your windscreen, now jab the mile air with bunches of carnations. A ragged bedsheet, grey-white, drifted down into their view. It was scrawled in the crimson capitals as if in virgin blood. Diana, queen of our hearts. You'd think they'd show more respect, Alison said, not flap about their old bed linen. Dirty linen, Colette said. She washed her dirty linen. It comes back on you in the end. They sped a mile or two in silence. I mean, it's not as if it's exactly a surprise. You didn't expect it to Too soon? But of course we should say that later in the novel Diana manifests herself.

We don't want to say too many spoilers about what she says and how she appears but it seems to me that one of the great things about the book, one of the themes of the book is the spirit of Diana

as in what we might think versus the spirit of Diana. So the show that Alison puts on for her punters versus the reality of the spirit world is like the posthumous worship of Diana versus this very confused woman who manifests herself to Alison. And I think that the thing that you get is just that

sense of claustrophobia like I say that oh my god if death isn't if death isn't the end then there's no end and then it's just and I think a lot, I honestly think a lot of people find that that's the thing that they can't take.

I agree because I think I love it about this book because I love darkness. But I feel that this book has got no salvation. There's no salvation in life after death because life after death seems to be dismally yet more life. You know, she makes a point at the beginning about She makes a point at the beginning about how banal, the banal things that dead people, the messages she gets, are actually really dull. They're really boring messages because she says, people in life, if they were boring, they don't change in death.

They don't become interesting and glamorous. They stay dead, really quite dull. And I think there's that sense of there is no heaven and there certainly isn't a God because, you know, she inquires, she asks Maurice at one point about... But there is a devil. There is a devil but there's no God. And there are dogs. Maurice says to her, oh, God, he's not somebody I've seen. And so you get this

sense of this eternal beyond black, this eternal sort of dismal, prosaic life going on and on and on with Morris fiddling with his flies and burping and swearing. But not the paradise, not the salvation, none of that. Not the beautiful ghostly ghosts, but these sort of creatures of the world. Flesh, they're really very lifelike. Maybe that's what we've answered, why some people don't like this book.

I think the book is, like all great literary fiction, what it does is it marries a huge range of imagination with absolutely pinpoint accurate observation and description so the bits that we've talked about for the last hour are basically a combination of

noting what the real world is like and imagining what the spirit world is like in terms that relate to one another I'm getting some I'm receiving now I think from the spirit world is like in terms that relate to one another. I'm getting some... I'm receiving now, I think, from the spirit realm that we're about 20 minutes over. So I think possibly that is as good a point to end as any.

Thanks hugely to Aretha, to our genius producer Matt Hall, and once again to our sponsors Unbound. You can get in touch with us on Twitter, at BacklistedPod, Facebook at Backlisted, and our page on the Unbound site, which is Boundless. In fact, on the Boundless site,

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