This is a deeply unsettling, and sometimes grimy and unpleasant read, but what made it unpleasant wasn’t the way it was haunted with sexual violence and misogyny, or the ugly picture it paints of suburban England of the late 90s and early 2000s, but the fundamentally incompatible and antagonistic relationship between the two main characters – Alison, the psychic medium and survivor of childhood abuse and neglect, and her brutally pragmatic assistant and business partner Colette.

I found myself getting really enraged on Alison’s behalf that Colette completely fails to understand the kind of torment that Alison faced as a child, and now also faces from the ghosts of the men who abused her. 

To Colette Alison seems hopeless: grossly fat, vulgar, undisciplined, fanciful. But Alison is actually quite sensitive, wise and insightful, and also a genuine medium who can actually predict the future and communicate with spirits of the dead. 

(I liked that Mantel treated Alison‘s ‘sensitive’ ability in a completely matter-of-fact way, rather than as something magical or fantastical. This book is quite insightful about the ‘show-business’ of being a spirit medium, but Alison’s often tacky colleagues are also the only ones who really understand this modern carnival life.)

Alison has also actually survived a truly heinous childhood in the most heroic way, and the contempt Colette feels for her is a complete failure of imagination and empathy. 

At first, Colette thinks that she can get Alison to write a book and make money from her experiences, but when Alison actually describes what happened to her in tape-recorded interviews, Colette shrinks from any recognition or understanding.

Hilary Mantel has described Alison as the kind of person that she Mantel might have become if she hadn’t been educated, and she’s also described Colette as the polar opposite of Alison. 

Mantel’s general contempt for English society (which suffuses this book) seems to be expressed most clearly in the character of Colette: someone with no intrinsic sense of self, who is completely obsessed with consumption and status, trends and fads. In raging against her hopeless and unpleasant ex-husband, Gavin, Colette completely fails to recognise that her own lack of imagination makes her Gavin’s perfect match.

But particularly reading Colette’s virulent fatphobia, and her bullying attempts to force Alison to diet, I wondered if Colette also represents Mantel’s cruel, self-punishing inner voice.

To read Alison and Colette’s interactions as their partnership goes on for years, and what was at first quite a mutually complementary and fruitful friendship disintegrates into mutual misunderstanding, felt dreary and infuriating, like trying to thread a needle with yarn too thick for its eye.

The way Mantel handles the details of Alison’s childhood is really interesting as well. Alison has become protectively amnesiac, blocking out memories of her neglectful sex-worker mother, who seemed both drawn to and trapped in a grotesque demimonde of soldiers and criminals in Aldershot, using Alison’s childhood home as a place to stash contraband and feed murder victims to savage dogs.

The absolute dread I felt to realise that these appalling men were not just bad memories from Alison’s childhood, but physical presences that have tormented her for decades, and who now are ganging up beyond the Veil to assault and torture Alison, made me not want to read the book at times.

But I was quite impressed by how deftly Mantel manages to turn the book around so that I found the ending quite hopeful and triumphant.

This book got really dark quite quickly with themes of child sexual abuse and neglect. Not in the right head space to read this right now.

I've read four other books by Mantel and loved them but this one really left me cold. Seeing people calling it "darkly funny" makes me wonder if I read the same book. There is plenty of darkness and also absurdity but none of it struck me as humorous. And it's not just dark; it's relentlessly squalid and grim. The main character passes from a childhood of horrific abuse to a miserable adulthood of loneliness and (physical and mental) suffering. Almost every other figure encountered, even briefly, is vile. I'm genuinely not sure what you're supposed to get from this. There is no doubting the skill; the squalor is very well written. But the only part I enjoyed was finishing it and knowing I didn't have to spend any more time in that world.

Stopped caring about any of the characters or what was happening.