Beyond Black: Demons Revealed by TERRENCE RAFFERTY

Beyond Black: Demons Revealed by TERRENCE RAFFERTY

BEYOND BLACK

By Hilary Mantel.

365 pp. A John Macrae

Book/Henry Holt & Company. $26.

HILARY MANTEL'S funny and harrowing new novel is the story of a woman who is coming to terms -- better late than never, as any one of the book's many platitude-dependent characters might say -- with her extremely disturbing past. And I say ''coming to terms with'' because that, too, is just the sort of comforting, shock-absorbing expression, familiar to viewers of the more earnest and wetly therapeutic daytime talk shows, that Mantel has made it her mission to seek out and destroy. The process undergone in the pages of ''Beyond Black'' by its fat, middle-aged English heroine, Alison Hart, is self-analysis and memory recovery of almost unimaginable psychic violence -- not the kind of self-actualizing experience Dr. Phil would recommend.

This is more like ''The Exorcist,'' with spinning heads and projectile vomiting and Jesuits hurling themselves through windows.

That's what coming to terms with one's past is, Mantel means to tell us, and she should know, having recently done the deed herself, in a painful, brilliantly prickly memoir called “Giving Up the Ghost.” She may regret not having saved that title for this book, because the heroine of ''Beyond Black'' is laboring to divest herself of malign spirits who are present in her life in the most immediate and most literal way. Alison is a professional medium and clairvoyant -- in her preferred terminology, a ''Sensitive'' -- and depends for her peculiar living on the services of a ''spirit guide'' named Morris, who is, in death as he was in life, an exceptionally nasty piece of work. He is also a constant reminder of the unspeakable childhood that Alison, for all her extrasensory powers, can recall only dimly.

Morris is the ghost she longs to give up, ''this grizzled grinning apparition in a bookmaker's check jacket, and suede shoes with bald toe caps'' -- a demon who sees himself as a lovable rogue, a sport, but is in fact about as foul a specimen of humanity, living or dead, as British fiction has conjured up in the past few years. (At least since Ian McEwan cleaned up his act.) And, worse, Morris has mates: a crew of villains whom he has begun to gather around him, from the four corners of the underworld, all of them now converging on the already crowded consciousness of Alison the Sensitive.

It is no coincidence that Morris's horrible party guests start turning up just as Alison has begun to dictate her autobiography to her ''sharp, rude, and effective'' new assistant, Colette. The ''fiends,'' as Alison calls them, are of course Mantel's metaphor for the awful, toxic stuff that tends to bubble up from the depths of the unconscious when a person tries to write her memoirs. There's a passage early in ''Giving Up the Ghost'' in which Mantel admits ''I hardly know how to write about myself,'' and briefly resolves to keep it simple, ''plain words on plain paper'' -- a resolution she sheepishly abandons in the next paragraph. ''I stray away from the beaten path of plain words,'' she writes, ''into the meadows of extravagant simile,'' and in ''Beyond Black'' she strays yet farther, finding in Alison the most extravagant simile of all. A novelist writing her memoirs, Mantel seems to say, is like a psychic reading her own mind.

In this book Mantel, back on her home turf of fiction (this is her ninth novel), allows herself to gorge on simile and metaphor and wild comic invention -- the treats she had tried, and guiltily failed, to deny herself while following the hard-fact regimen of ''Giving Up the Ghost.'' (At one point in the novel, Alison is put on a diet by stern Colette, and she suffers agonies.) ''Beyond Black'' feels like a great, gleeful binge, a wallow in the not-good-for-you riches of this writer's extraordinarily vivid, violent imagination.

This is a dark, dark book, but it's fun to read because at heart it's a celebration of the joys of saying exactly what's on your evil little mind. The heroine might be speaking for the author when she tries to explain to Colette why the hideous Morris is her guide, and why the fiends have come to call: ''Ever since I was a little kid,'' she says, ''I've been trying to have nice thoughts. But how could I? My head was stuffed with memories. I can't help what's in there. . . . And so when you have certain thoughts -- thoughts you can't help -- these sort of spirits come rushing round. And you can't dislodge them. Not unless you could get the inside of your head hoovered out.'' That's the distinctive voice of Hilary Mantel, building from a soft, polite whisper to an explosively funny image -- the comic metaphor that makes life, if not worth living, at least worth writing.

Everything else, ''Beyond Black'' says, is euphemism, flimflam, camouflage. One of the good jokes of this book is that while Alison's powers are terrifyingly authentic, her stage patter is relentlessly soothing and upbeat, her flashes of dire insight muffled, for her public, in cottony cliché: ''It's about impressing them without scaring them,'' Mantel writes, ''softening the edges of their fright and disbelief.'' (Alison scrupulously avoids, for example, using the words ''die'' and ''death'' in her stage appearances or her private consultations with clients.) But Alison, to her horror and to her credit, is finally not capable of softening the edges of her own fright and disbelief, with nice words or nice thoughts or even a nice house in a brand-new development where no one has ever lived before. ''I'd like to live nowhere,'' she says, but she can't: the fiends track her down, and black slime starts to ooze up from the very ground on which the proud, cheesy instant community stands.

Yes, that's a metaphor, too. Mantel has a million of them, mostly of the shocking, grotesque variety, and at a certain point in ''Beyond Black'' you begin to realize that they are her weapons of choice in a continuing (and almost certainly unwinnable) battle against the dreadful blandness of 21st-century English life: a society that in this novel's satiric vision appears to have become a kingdom of euphemism, a place whose organizing principle is the denial of the rude facts of life and death. Flannery O'Connor, herself no mean connoisseur of the grotesque, once wrote: ''All comic novels that are any good must be about matters of life and death.'' That's precisely the sort of mortal urgency you feel in Mantel's extravagant similes and bursting metaphors. This is, I think, a great comic novel. Hilary Mantel's humor, like Flannery O'Connor's, is so far beyond black it becomes a kind of light.

Terrence Rafferty is the author of ''The Thing Happens: Ten Years of Writing About the Movies.''

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/review/15COVERRAFFE.html