(She clearly was insane, but that doesn't mean she didn't see ghosts, too.) But the ghosts in "Beyond Black" are fully fledged characters, some of whom are alive during flashbacks to Alison's childhood and dead during later scenes, or maybe they were actually dead during Al's childhood - it's all quite difficult to tell.Īlison's childhood was so horrific that she can't remember large swathes of it - to call it "Dickensian" barely begins to describe it.
We the readers never saw the dead in "Every Day Is Mother's Day," and it was hard to tell whether Evelyn herself actually saw them or whether she was just insane. But the ghosts have become more insistent between Mantel's first book and her most recent. Spirits have played a role in many of Mantel's books, including her 2003 memoir "Giving Up the Ghost," in which she describes her sadness at selling the weekend house where she last saw her stepfather alive, and where she frequently thought she caught glimpses of his ghost on the stairs. You can break these spending habits - well, you must, really.Or I can see the bailiffs in, before Christmas." That's a pretty pointed comment, but could still be seen as a lucky guess, a psychological extrapolation from the woman's appearance.īut sometimes Alison says something that seems like it could only have come from the dead, as when she tells a woman in the audience that the baby she miscarried 30 years earlier is a grown-up man in the spirit world, that he's been looked after by other relatives and that he goes by the name she had picked out for him while she was pregnant: Alistair.īy clicking Sign up, you agree to our privacy policy. Let me give you a word of advice," she says to a heckler. Some of her messages are so generic they could be meant for anyone: "Your daddy's still keeping an eye on you," she tells one woman who's actually looking for her boyfriend, who had been killed in a traffic accident. She does private consultations and works psychic fairs, but the book's big set pieces show Al performing onstage in seedy theaters, a cross between Oprah, John Edward and a stand-up comedian. Mantel's new novel, "Beyond Black," also features a psychic, but Alison Hart has a much better feel than Evelyn did for what her customers want to hear.
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