“Transformation is my business.” One of Mantel’s most idiosyncratic novels sees him apply this transformational flair to a village riven with ancient hatreds. On a dark and stormy night in 1956, a stranger named Fludd turns up in a dismal northern English village wrapped in a black cloak and carrying a black bag. As John Mullan wrote in the Guardian: “In a very black comedy of elaborately choreographed coincidences, weakness and self-indulgence are duly punished.” Fludd (1989)
Newly released from 10 years of incarceration after the suspicious death of her mother, Muriel – “a square, plain woman forty-four years old” – is out for revenge against several of the characters from the earlier book. Muriel’s case files get lost due to a farcical combination of bureaucratic failure and the extramarital high jinks of those tasked with looking after them, with fatal results. They are opposites.Mantel’s debut is a devastating black comedy which skewered the inadequacy of social service provision in the 1970s through the story of the Axons: widowed Evelyn (the first deeply flawed spiritualist to haunt Mantelworld) and her dependant daughter Muriel, whose mysterious pregnancy is discovered at the opening of the novel. Alison and Collette have a strange relationship.Did you actually believe in Alison and her world view, or did you think it was possibly a hoax or even psychosis brought on by childhood abuse?.How did you find the experience of reading Beyond Black?.It is not long before the place beyond black threatens to uproot their lives forever. Troubles spiral out of control when the pair moves to a suburban wasteland in what was once the English countryside. When they meet at a fair, Alison invites Colette at once to join her on the road as her personal assistant and companion. Colette and Alison are unlikely cohorts: one a shy, drab beanpole of an assistant, the other a charismatic, corpulent psychic whose connection to the spiritual world torments her.
Our book group choice for October 2015 is Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel.
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