I requested Beyond Black, by Hillary Mantel from the library after hearing an interview with the author on CBC’s Writers & Company a few months back. Based on the radio interview I started into the novel figuring that Mantel's take on the occult subject matter would be pretty open-minded. The book turned out to be a satire of our fascination with spiritual mediums currently embodied by the likes of television's John Edward. Because the tone was more sardonic than what I had been expecting throughout the first two-thirds of the novel I kept expecting that the authenticity of the overweight and literally 'haunted' protagonist Allison would be called into question at some point. It never was. I think Mantel assumed that most of her readers would take it as a given that mediums are fraudsters, and she chose to create something more imaginatively bent than a straight debunking of mediumship would allow (A.S. Byatt did this pretty well in Possession anyway).

Allison really can talk to the dead, and the point that I took from Mantel’s novel was that even if someone like John Edwards could live up his claims, the human tendency to self delusion would cancel out any benefit that might be potentially gained, other than shallow consolation. As an illustration of this innate tendency to denial, Mantel depicts two versions of the world of the dead. There’s the one that she describes to 'The Punters' that pay to see her; a temperature-controlled, manicured version of heaven, in which everyone reverts to whatever age they were when they were happiest, are reunited with friends and relatives, and, or course, their cherished pets. The reality that Allison keeps to herself is basically our own mundane world, filled to the brim with spirits just a little bit more lost and confused than they were when they were living. More of the same, really, and not much to look forward to.

Allison makes her living giving people consolation and guidance. As it turns out these are not skills that the dead are necessarily any more equipped with than the living. All the mediums in this book are business people first, mediums second, and they have to give their audiences what they want. Allison has to mainly rely on a combination of flattery, trickery, and cold reading to achieve this. She saves the little bits of useable material provided by the dead for the one-two punch.

This is the first thing that I've read that gave me an understanding of how cold reading works beyond the theoretical. Having spent several years in sales related jobs, what struck me was how much the technique seems to have in common with selling strategies. The foundation of cold-reading and selling is a faith in the over-riding predictability of human behaviour- with enough practice and experience you discover that there are actually quite a limited range of responses to specific statements and questions. Once you figure out what things you need to say in order to elicit the right response, you can maintain a conversation that seems completely natural but is actually meticulously preconceived.

The other trump card that sales people and mediums share is that people may act skeptical and stubborn, but the very fact they've come to see a performance of a medium (or are talking to salesperson on the phone for more than twelve seconds) means some part of them is daring you to convince them; they want to be sold something. Allison always picks on the person who appears to be the most adamant and outspoken skeptic, and keeps on at them despite their protests, cool as a cucumber, until she finds an emotional hook that leaves them exposed. She knows her audience, and there is enough commonality that she can usually find that trigger that will leave them bawling. Once the skeptic is won over, convincing the rest of the audience is a lot easier.

And it is not just the living that look for consolation; the dead hound her too, their memories failing, many unaware that they have died at all, desperate to push themselves into the world of the living through Allison. Most of the time their interjections are unwanted, and she struggles through long sleepless nights to keep a lid on them. When they do successfully get through, their messages are often meaningless, usually banal, and sometimes filled with pathos; an old granny comes through Allison to send a message to a beloved grandchild, but the teenage girl fails to remember (or doesn't care) what her grandmother's given name was and waves off any attempt at communication. Another Gran shows up in on client's laps during readings, looking for a friend she had tea with thirty years ago and a button that has fallen off her sweater. Allison gives them what comfort that she can, but she has problems of her own to worry about. More about those problems in my follow up post…

6:47 AM