Mantel is a favourite author of mine, an intelligent writer with a devastating wit and talent for exposing the ordinary as something else entirely. Alison is a fine creation – a large fat woman in peach, stoically enduring torment at the hands of ‘the Fiends’, the voices which haunt her.

“The afterlife is just like Aldershot’”she maintains, and this line is funny in context, less funny as the novel progresses, because Aldershot is where Alison grew up, or was dragged up, by her prostitute mother. This is where she acquired the dreadful Morris, whom Alison taunts with never having been given a Christian burial when he provokes her sufficiently. There is considerable aggression between Morris and Alison – she gets tumbled out of bed in the middle of the night by him, threatened and terrorised, often with an uncomfortable sexual overtone. In the course of taping for Colette’s book, amid the hilarity of the medium’s meetings and Alison’s .humorous observations

(“There’s a certain 1950s air about the dead…because they’re clean and respectable…as if they came before white nylon shirts and indoor sanitation…certainly before sexual intercourse.”)

The appalling truth about Alison’s past emerges - the lesson she was taught, the scars on her legs, the operation which took her will out of her and put theirs in instead. The voices she hears are the voices of these teachers, her mother’s clients, and the extremes to which Alison was driven to by them when still a child.

So the ghost story may not after all be a ghost story at all – maybe this is a story about repression of memory and a very different kind of haunting from the traditional kind. However you wish to interpret it, the book is a wildly hilarious and painfully sad revelation of a woman’s life. There are no graphics here – Alison’s ’s mother may hire her out to men, but Alison only recalls being told always to say she was sixteen “which is confusing when you’re only about 10’” and lets the reader work out what is going on.

The novel is rich with characters – the psychics and their preferred modes of communication and dress; the ghastly spirits who haunt Alison, every bit as real as the living, and certainly more powerful; the clients who must be protected from the things Alison knows, but from whose biographies she herself has no protection.

As always with Mantel, the dialogue crackles with wit and shrewd observation. The collapse of Colette’s marriage, shown through dialogue, is a perfect gem, both amusing and sad and outrageous. The chat between the psychics is riotous. But it is Alison herself, with her edged fragments of memory of bits of waste ground and glimpse of savage violence, her compassion and her confusion, her wit and her suffering, who makes this novel a great one.

Marion Arnott lives in Paisley, Scotland. She was winner of the Phillip Good Memorial Prize For Women's Fiction 1998, CWA Short Dagger 2001 and shortlisted for CWA Short Dagger 2002. Work has appeared in Scottish Child, West Coast, Solander Magazine, Peninsula , QWF, Hayakawa Mystery Magazine (Japan), Books Ireland, Northwords, Chapman, Crimewave, and Datlow and Winding's Year's Best Fantasy and Horror volume 15. Her short story collection 'Sleepwalkers,' was published in August, 2003 by Elastic Press. To visit Marion's Showcase on this website, click here

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.