At the time of writing it’s only two days ago (with Hubby on a boys-night out) that I binge-watched Series 5 of Ghosts on BBC iPlayer – the British series, not the US version. If you’ve never seen it, the premise is that a young couple, Alison and Mike Cooper, live in the huge, run-down Button House estate, which Alison inherited out of the blue from a distant relative.
Button House is haunted by the ghosts of people from various time periods, all of whom died in the house or grounds, though Alison and Mike can’t see or hear them. At first the ghosts want the couple gone and after trying and failing to scare them away, one of them pushes Alison from a first-floor window. When she awakes from a coma two weeks later, Alison finds she can see and hear the ghosts. At first they think she’s hallucinating, but Alison and Mike (who still can’t see or hear the ghosts) later come to accept they’re real. And so the squabbling ghosts and the young couple learn to live together as a sort of dysfunctional family (is there any other kind?).
A different Alison, Alison Hart, heroine of Hilary Mantel’s book Beyond Black, doesn’t need a bump on the head to see and hear ghosts. She was “very small indeed…I remember being aware of presences before I could walk or talk.” Alison Hart is “a medium: dead people talked to her, and she talked back…a clairvoyant: she could see straight through the living…She wasn’t (by nature) a fortune teller but it was hard to make people understand that.”
In contrast to Alison Cooper’s experience of ghosts, Alison’s Hart’s is much more sinister. Her spirit guide, Morris, is a “low” foul-mouthed man who plays with his fly buttons and follows her to the toilet “if he was in that sort of mood”; oh, and Morris made contact with Alison when she was only 13. On stage Alison “blazed like a planet” but later, in a hotel room, she would “retch over the bowl” and suffer “bouts of pain”. If that wasn’t bad enough, her childhood – in the shape of Morris’s also-dead, also-low-life friends, McArthur, Bob Fox, Aikenside, Pikey Pete, Keef Capstick and Nick – comes back to haunt her…literally.
Mantel is – was (she died in 2022) – a wonderful story teller and Beyond Black is a grotesque, savage and darkly comic take on the enduring effects of childhood trauma.
Rating: ** Worth reading.
Hilary Mantel won the Booker Prize twice for Wolf Hall and also with its sequel Bring Up the Bodies (which also won the Costa Book of the Year). I’ve reviewed the latter along with the final book in her Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror and the Light in a previous blogs. I’ve also reviewed her collection of short stories Learning to Talk.
Merry Christmas Everyone!
whatcathyread 