![]() But they are out there, on the road, the Alisons, the mediums. If, as a reader, you feel briskly and brightly that dead is dead, alive is alive, and anything else is nonsense, this novel is probably not for you. This is a book out of the unconscious, where the best novels come from. She's witty, ironic, intelligent and, I suspect, haunted. Most don't, next door being a rather nasty and disturbing place. She produces characters - some dead, some partly dead, some barely alive but pretending - that are as strong and vivid on the page as if they were living or dying next door - if only you cared to go there. She persuades, she convinces, she offers an alternative universe, she uses the extraordinary descriptive skills that are her trademark - Mantel does "seedy" as no one else, except possibly Graham Greene in his early novels, The Confidential Agent and Brighton Rock. ![]() She has taken those moments between sleep and waking, when we hardly know who we are, or why, and turned them into a novel that makes the unbelievable believable. She has taken that ethereal halfway house between heaven and hell, between the living and the dead, and nailed it on the page. ![]() Hilary Mantel has done something extraordinary. ![]()
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