Two women, yoked together by professional need and personal weakness, are driving round London’s orbital motorway, a modern version of Hell. They once liked and trusted each other, but now the tiniest flaws make them mad. Fat, timid Al is a medium; thin, flint-eyed Colette is her “manager”, attending to her every practical need from VAT returns to breakfast. Quite apart from their disintegrating relationship, they have a serious problem: Alison isn’t a fake. Not only can she genuinely converse with ghosts, but she has a deeply unpleasant “guide”, a former clown called Morris, The kind of spirit who follows you into the lavatory, he is searching for his equally sinister old mates.

This is a splendid start to Beyond Black, Hilary Mantel’s tenth novel, and the public séance that follows is hideously funny. Alison’s suburban audience IS suggestible to the point of stupidity; they ask whether “Her Majesty the Queen Mother” has been reunited with King George, and happily accept praise from dead ancestors about their new kitchen units. Al has fun telling her audiences what they want to hear, and there is only the occasional ugly note, such as when she pretends to pass on a message from a woman’s father, and is told: “Tell the old sod to bugger off . . . If I hear any more about my bastard dad I’ll see you outside and sort you out.”

Al’s real ghosts are, however, of another ilk. Some are “marooned in an eternal Sunday afternoon . . . with sod all going on”; but Morris and his mates are taught by the Devil himself. As we learn more and more about Al, we begin to wonder whether the ghosts might be projections of childhood rape and abuse, described in harrowing detail. Profoundly scarred by her experiences, Al finds that her only comforter is an elderly ghost in search of her best friend. As in Mantels’ greatest influence, Muriel Spark, it is the satirical, malign bizarre aspect of the supernatural which predominates..

There are echoes here of the haunted Catholic Mantel described in her outstanding memoir Giving Up the Ghost, but whereas the young Hilary made her escape via a good grammar school, poor Alison hooks up with another medium, [who claims to be her grandmother], and begins putting on surprisingly successful shows at psychic “fayres”. It is at one of these that she meets the beige Colette, who is abandoning a sterile marriage and a career in computing, and attracted by Al’s promise of a man whose name begins with ‘M’ entering her life. This is, naturally, the repulsive Morris. The novel’s true dynamic is the contrast between the two women, rather than the quest to rid Al of Morris, and it is tempting to think that Mantel has split herself in two to achieve it. Colette gets the razor-sharp mind and sardonic wit; Al gets the size 20 body and the vulnerability. It is hard to warm to either character. Forseeing the death of Diana and 9/11, she is a helpless jelly, all sensibility and no sense.

Yet as well as exploring Mantel’s customary themes of loss and identity, Beyond Black has aspirations to be a state of the nation novel. Densely written, Mantel’s is a portrait of unremitting ugliness and gloom, with denatured towns and monstrous multi-storied car-parks and ghosts queuing to ask about lost pension books.. The new-build housing estate where the women buy their joint home (and are taken for lesbians) is described with savage comedy. It is life as death.

However, both the suburbs and the absurdity of mediums have been mocked better (the latter by Noel Coward). The really disappointing thing about Beyond Black is that not much happens. The ghosts rant on and on, the two women torment each other, and after 451 pages, Colette returns to her husband and Alison succeeds in getting rid of her repulsive spirits. Mantel’s best books have, like Colette, been lean and mean, and her worst have been over-inflated and portentous. It gives me no pleasure to say that, on this occasion, the fat woman wins.

The New Statesman, March 2005