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A review by mafiabadgers
Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel
Did not finish book. Stopped at 25%.
Valiantly attempted 01/2025, my first DNF for Farnham book club
Chapter One is a nice page and a half prologue, very atmospheric. Unfortunately things immediately take a turn for the worse. Structurally, it feels rather perfunctory: forty pages of tawdry psychic feats, forty-five pages of Colette's loveless failed marriage and subsequent meeting with Alison, forty-two pages of Alison's childhood neglect. There's not a single happy moment until page 92, and even then it only lasts another page. In the end, I couldn't stand it any more.
It doesn't help that I've also been reading a collection by Eileen Chang, Love in a Fallen City. They're both literary and cynical and bound up with women's lives and concerns, but Love is exciting where Beyond Black is drab, seedy where it is sordid. No competition at all.
Chapter One is a nice page and a half prologue, very atmospheric. Unfortunately things immediately take a turn for the worse. Structurally, it feels rather perfunctory: forty pages of tawdry psychic feats, forty-five pages of Colette's loveless failed marriage and subsequent meeting with Alison, forty-two pages of Alison's childhood neglect. There's not a single happy moment until page 92, and even then it only lasts another page. In the end, I couldn't stand it any more.
It doesn't help that I've also been reading a collection by Eileen Chang, Love in a Fallen City. They're both literary and cynical and bound up with women's lives and concerns, but Love is exciting where Beyond Black is drab, seedy where it is sordid. No competition at all.