beyond black

'Beside her, in profile against the fogged window, the driver's face is set. In the back seat, something dead stirs, and begins to grunt and breathe. The car flees across the junctions, and the space the road encloses is the space inside her: the arena of combat, the wasteland, the place of civil strife behind her ribs. Heart beats, the tail lights wink. Dim lights shine from tower blocks, from passing helicopters, from fixed stars. Night closes in on the perjured ministers and burnt-out paedophiles, on the unloved viaducts and graffiti bridges, on ditches beneath mouldering hedgerows and railings never warmed by human touch.
Night and winter: but in the rotten nests and empty setts, she can feels the signs of growth, intimations of spring. This is the time of Le Pendu, the Hanged Man, swinging by his foot from the living tree. It is a time of suspension, of hesitation, of the indrawn breath. It is a time to let go of expectation, yet not abandon hope; to anticipate the turn of the Wheel of Fortune. This is our life and we have to lead it. Think of the alternative.
A static cloud bank, like an ink smudge. Darkening air.
It's not good asking me whether I'd choose to be like tho because I've never had a choice. I do't know about anything else, I've never been any other way.
And darker still. Colour has run out from the land. only form is left: the clumped treetops like a dragon's back. The sky deepens to midnight blue. The orange of the street lights is blotted to a fondant cerise; in pastureland, the pylons lift their skirts in a ferrous gavotte.'


- Hilary Mantel
Beyond Black
(Page 2)



Akin to Angela Carter's, Nights At The Circus there is a base grimness to the modern fairy tale yarn Hilary Mantel spins in Beyond Black.
The tumultuous yet mundane account of a 'gifted' woman and her frigid assistant echoes the same mismatched surrogate family presented in Nights, where there is both love and resentment in equal measure, though the latter is shown more readily with a disturbingly pointed ease.

Whilst reading Angela Carter's stories, there is a constant pull throughout the story that you can't help but be dragged along with.
A physical progression, even if you remain within the same four walls and a similar momentum is particularly present in Beyond Black.
The pull has an aimlessness to it but it's never unrewarding as you don't feel bored with the story, only comfortably swept along with the travails of these earthy characters.
As if you could dig up your back garden and there would be the main character, Alison happily residing underneath the soil, waiting to be unearthed and read.

I can't say i was bowled over by Hilary Mantel's preternatural novel.
The type of language seen in the above quote is only really seen at the beginning and end of the novel and i wanted more.
Far more and it left me a little dissatisfied.
Also, for the majority of the book i perpetually asked myself, "Why am i not just reading Angela Carter?"
I suppose this is unfair to Mantel as it's almost impossible not to be compared to her peers, this being the same for any writer but Carter has such a commanding literary presence that when it comes to magic-realism she is and always will be the Magna Imperatrix of temporal surreality.
End of story.
Period.
Fact.
However, i do feel as though Hilary Mantel managed to bridge the gap between the living and the dead.
She opened up the realm known as Purgatory and has given us a disheartening glimpse into the affairs of the detained, the Rephaim of Sheol, the Holy Souls.
And it isn't pretty.
And it doesn't end well.
For anybody.




'Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

A penny for the Old Guy

I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.'


- T.S. Eliot
The Hollow Men