Black Gate

You never know when you’ll find something fantastical to write about.

A little while ago, I started an ongoing project of reading through the novels of Iris Murdoch. This came out of an appreciation of A.S. Byatt’s fiction, which led to me reading her study of Murdoch’s early novel, Degrees of Freedom. That book in turn led me to start in on Murdoch. I loved her first novel, Under the Net, which is something like what might have happened if P.G. Wodehouse had written a philosophical social realist novel. The next book, The Flight From the Enchanter, was well-written but sprawling and felt overly symbolically-determined. So I started on the third novel, 1957’s The Sandcastle, unsure of what I’d find.

It’s set in a town not far from London and deals with an extramarital affair between Bill Mor (known throughout the book as Mor), a teacher at St. Bride’s school for boys, and a young painter named Rain Carter, who comes to the school to paint a portrait of the school’s former headmaster, Demoyte, a longstanding friend of Mor’s. For the first seven chapters, the book unfolds much as you’d expect from a mimetic novel. The background of Mor and his family and his school is sketched in; his political ambitions are described; the implicit conflict with his strong-willed wife Nan is set up; the personality of Rain is implied; a set of accidents throw Mor and Rain into close proximity. The prose is direct, even simple, and on the whole without ornament.

Then we get to chapter eight and everything changes.

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Hilary Mantel’s two novels of Tudor-era statesman Thomas Cromwell, 2009’s Wolf Hall and 2012’s Bring Up the Bodies, have both won the Man Booker prize; a third, The Mirror and the Light, will complete the trilogy, but has not yet been scheduled for publication. I want to write here not about those books, but about 2005’s Beyond Black, the last book Mantel published before embarking on the Cromwell trilogy. Her ninth novel, it was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Orange Prize. It’s a novel of the fantastic, in the broadest sense, and can be approached as fantasy, as horror, even as noir; but may be best understood simply as a thing in itself.

It’s the story of a medium, Alison Hart (born Cheetham, who changed her name for obvious PR reasons), and the business manager she hires, Colette. It follows their relationship, as well as Alison’s half-hearted attempt to recover memories of her abusive childhood. It’s also the story of their relationship with the ghosts who follow Alison, but remain invisible and imperceptible to Colette. One of these is Alison’s principal spirit guide, Morris, and you will find few characters living or dead nastier than he and his friends. Morris is one of a group of thugs from Alison’s past and understanding their background — what Alison did as a girl and what was done to her — becomes the key to the novel.

Or, at least, a key. The book’s notably plotless, in the sense of being defined by actions in sequence that necessitate one another. Things happen, characters change and are revealed, but there’s no tight narrative. The book’s held together by character, by imagery, by tone, and by the fantastic conceit at its heart: the validity of ghosts and psychic experience. To me, that makes it not just a fantasy, but one that’s worth looking at because the fantasy does something unusual — it’s part of the structure of the book in an interesting way.

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