I read Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel

This is an interesting book on several levels, though I don't know if it comes together in a super exciting way for me as a novel. Maybe I reach for the comparison because I rewatched Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai on my birthday, but this is a very Jim Jarmusch-paced novel about being a psychic medium in the UK at the turn of the millennium. You know, the recent one. I guess by this I mean that while there's very dark stuff going on in the background, the sensibility is more like the pace of daily life, and just as much meaning is in repeated, mundane and boring moments as they are in moments of violence or terror.

I read it because I was interested in a grounded take on psychic readings, because I'm writing a novel now that's (in part) a grounded take on professional hypnotism. They're two sort of wiggly, pseudoscientific categories that seem adjacent to each other, because how they work is so tied up in both the hypnotist/psychic's showmanship or guidance as well as the sympathy and openness of, as Al would put it, the punters.

Al, Alison Hart, is a fat woman who had a very rough, very destitute childhood but has found a steady living as a performance psychic. She straightforwardly can sense, see, and interact with dead people. Sometimes they can use her presence to interfere with objects in the land of the living, like writing over tape recordings, moving objects and so on. She hires Collette, the pinnacle of a self-confident yet utterly pathetic loser-in-denial as a sort of assistant.

They have a pretty good toxic yuri dynamic, though (perhaps necessarily) lesbianism is repeatedly invoked yet explicitly disavowed. The majority of the book follows the A plot of Collette cruelly trying to "improve" Al's life and business alongside the B plot of gradual reveals about Al's childhood, and the mystery of why her spirit guides seem to be dodgy, unpleasant criminals.

On the A Plot: Mantel's prose is lovely but at the same time this book felt hard to read in an unexpected way, because there's so much body talk. Far from the doddering thematic stupidity of recent ubiquity Butter, where disgust at fat bodies is ultimately natural and good; where fat people are beasts of immoderation but the society of harmonious moderacy wisely decrees if you eat in a profoundly disordered way, well, make sure you only go no more than (gasp!) 10 kilos in the other direction (and doesn't see this as a contradiction... anyways! lol), other people's responses to Al's fatness are rendered bluntly, but complicated by her own interiority.

Basically, we see that the continuous concern trolling, subtle or explicit disrespect, and even attempts to control her diet are not just like... hurting a person (which is more than most contemporary litfic can find the nuance and characterization for), but also it makes the thin people doing this come across as monstrous, small-minded, boring and drab to her. When their collaboration eventually falls apart, Collette ends up with the impoverished life such an impoverished mindset and sensibility deserves, in a really funny way.

On the B Plot: as every a24 movie will bash you over the head with: GHOSTS are a METAPHOR for UNRESOLVED TRAUMA. That is also the case here but I think the medium function here is making that metaphor work a little more than the generally low-effort "elevated horror" concepts. Not only does it gradually become apparent that Al's "spirit guide" who she is forced to cohabitate with and humorously "tolerate" as a part of her schtick is actually one of her primary childhood abusers-- the very way the spirit realm works, crowding out your thoughts unexpectedly, replaying your (or a spirit's) most awful moments, and the way the spirits themselves can often seem aimless and unsure of what they're doing, where (or when) they are, all offer a different facet on how truly awful experiences shape us and live on with us.

Al eventually splits with both Collette and the gang of "spirit guides" hanging over her, but the possibility that she could summon the latter back inadvertently with her thoughts, and basically has to outrun this possibility by living for herself, is left open.

It was interesting to read this book from 2005 that seems to precede two threads that seem basically inescapable in the highly-genrefied litfic landscape of the present. The "trauma plot," or childhood trauma as a plot device in the sense that it creates intrigue or a mystery has been discussed to death; on the other hand everyone seems to be too embarrassed to discuss how obvious the trope of the Tragic and Elegant Thin Protagonist (who may or may not be explicitly contrasted with a fixation on fat people as stupid and disgusting) has become.

In both cases, even though I think this novel was a liiiiittle long and repetitive for how light it ended up being on events or resolution, it addresses both of these things more interestingly than more recent examples of books I've read, and comes from before either thing was, well, a thing. Plus Hilary Mantel has a super absorbing and transparent prose style, the sort of thing I feel jealous of because I can't do it. It wasn't what I expected at all, but I'm glad it jumped out at me... almost like... a message of some sort--!