This review could be 20 paragraphs long, that's how personal a connection this novel had for me in reaction. More than just enjoyable, at least 1/2 was outright LOL, literally. The descriptive mastery! Not an easy read, as there are 4 comparative context metaphors or some kind of nuance allusion or allegory to a paragraph, but what an effect! Also despite being in another country, the absolutely identical cultural context issues to the time we experienced are just incredible. Like the paper folded contraptions, for example, we played games with that she calls "quackers". We did the same on another continent. We folded them and worked them like beaks too, used them to tell our fortunes, like a Magic 8 Ball, some of you may remember. There was a fad for them that lingered for 2 or 3 years, just about as long as the hula hoop. Boys made them too. Hilary Mantel, IMHO, is the best Boomer generation female writer in that art of putting people into their core cultural context almost instantly. She is a genius. Not just with words, but within the memory of all 5 senses that she can relate per sentence. As she details within this book, when she is writing about herself that her past memory feels of fluffed fur more than any visual picture reel as in a movie. It's coming from all directions. Like the wool smell of wet uniforms, the chalk dust mixed with baloney sandwich meat smell. So many more here. And remembering the real shock when the 3 outfits you owned were all mini's and within a 1/2 year the mini's were out and you looked like a cartoon character if you tried to wear one within a room of 50 other girls in Midi's who also held "5-6-9 Shop" credit cards that you certainly didn't. Our "Sophy's" had another name. We used to call them "the Canadians" so that no one knew who were talking about. We didn't live in a welfare state though as Carmel does in this novel. So no school lunches, you ate what you carried in with you too, even if you were there for 15 hours straight. We had no gym and our exercise was getting there. (2 buses and a mile walk both before and after the boarding each way). In winter, we left in the dark and got home in the dark. Blizzards, still not allowed to wear pants either. I still know how to ride on the bottom step of the back door of a CTA bus. It was my "place". We were all skinny, but not as skinny as Carmel in this novel. That is were we differ the most. My family didn't own a car. The 17 year old "Sophy's" in my time drove their own. The same class and economic issues, precisely. And the contraceptive stories were nearly identical with this novel, but you needed to find your own doctor. None supplied. Regardless, we had a nun in Sophomore Year who illustrated sexual coitus in great detail on a blackboard so that no one could plead ignorance. Hilary would laugh. Many then and now still take the Sue (in the book) route, it seems, regardless. Hilary Mantel's description of what love is when she first hears Lynette's voice is one of the best I have ever come across. And it didn't take 3 tomes to get there either. Her fellowship between women quotient is just out of the stratosphere. Top tier writer- absolutely gifted and practiced.Here's to all of us, all we good Catholic girls everywhere who learned to love our Katrinas. And God too.
I was so enchanted by Wolf Hall that I resolved to read Hilary Mantel's other novels. I had not heard of her before Wolf Hall won the Booker Prize and I don't think she was very well-known in the United States previously, but is highly respected in England. She has published ten novels, An Experiment in Love being her seventh. It is a sad, sad tale, very English and it reminded me of Anne Enright's The Gathering. Somehow, Mantel's writing just drags you into the hearts of her characters and keeps you there feeling all their sufferings, fleeting joys, hopes and confusions, as they move through their lives. It is actually excruciating but that is often just what I want in a novel. Carmel McBain comes from working class Irish-Catholic parents who settled in one of those mill towns in the Liverpool area (where the Beatles came from.) By the time their only child was born, the town was dying. Both parents worked and scrimped but Carmel's mother, in her own emtionally stunted way, pushed her daughter to aspire for more. This is a coming-of-age story of Carmel as she leaves her Catholic girlhood, goes to college in the 60s, learns about and lives through sex, love and birth control while she studies and starves on her scholarship grant. It is a familiar plot, this trajectory of a sheltered young woman moving into fuller life in the big wide treacherous world of late 20th century life. The telling of the tale is what got me. From Shirley Jackson's Hangsaman to Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld, we get these stories that are almost the female side of the Holden Caufield thing. And the female experience is more fraught with emotional danger just because we are the second sex.
What do You think about An Experiment In Love (1997)?
An Experiment in Love is Carmel's story of her childhood somewhere near Manchester. She is educated at Catholic schools, earns a scholarship as a passport out of her working class background, and fetches up at university in London. Here she makes new friends from different classes and parts of the country, but fails to sever her ties with her school friends, who have joined her at the same hall of residence.Carmel reflects back on her life, prompted by a newspaper article about a friend and former co-student, but it is only when we approach the novel's end that we realise how her story, and her friend's profession, are linked, and can understand what has prompted Carmel's reminiscences.This is a coming of age biographical novel, told against a background of the 1960s and early 1970s, of girls leaving home for the first time and trying to live independently in London. We are vaguely aware of the wave of feminism that underpins the era, although these girls are having to work it out for themselves. As someone who was born in the same year as Hilary Mantel, I was also touched by the memories that are so relevant to the 1960s, especially the ritual of buying the first school uniform, and encountering school teachers who are quick to lash out with a ruler.T S Eliot famously stated that his past was part of his present, and this is acutely true of Carmel and her tale. She may have risen above her working class background, but she can never leave her former self behind.
—Sandra Lawson
‘An Experiment in Love’ is a novel that I expected to connect with more than in fact I did. It follows a girl called Carmel as she gets into a selective high school, has to have a whole fancy uniform that seems incredibly expensive, does well at school, goes off to university, and negotiates the novel freedom of living with a group of other young women for the first time. Although the narrative is set in the 1970s, I had all the aforementioned experiences myself in the 90s and 00s. Carmel is an interesting character and I liked that her friendships and emnities with women were the focus rather than her boyfriend. (He lurked stolidly in the background.) On the other hand, said relationships remained somehow mysterious and Carmel’s first person narrative never quite hooked me. I found the treatment of her eating disorder odd and the tempo of events uneven. This wasn’t any fault in the writing, which was beautiful, but perhaps had something to do with the memoir-ish structure. The narrative darts back and forth between school and university days, with no apparent rhyme or reason. This makes for a meditative rather than plot-driven novel.Now and again there was a magnificently acute paragraph, though. This one in particular:When men decided that women could be educated - this is what I think - they educated them on the male plan; they put them into schools with mottoes and school songs and muddy team games, they made them wear collars and ties. It was a way to concede the right to learning, yet remain safe; the products of the system would always be inferior to the original model. Women were forced to imitate men, and bound not to succeed at it.As I re-read that passage, I noticed that Carmel refers to women as ‘they’ not ‘we’. Perhaps that is what limited my engagement with this novel - her sense of detachment. Thus I was interested but not moved, when I expected both. Hilary Mantel is an incredible writer, though, so I am holding her to much higher standards than most. At the end of the edition I read is an interview in which she says that A Place of Greater Safety was the first novel she wrote, back in the 1970s. That’s incredible! It’s one of my all time favourite books and she wrote it while in her 20s, never having written a novel before. What talent.
—Anna
This haunting book brought to mind Peter Ackroyd's note on "The eternal present of the past." Curiously, its tragic ending echoed that of one of my favorite books, "The Girls of Slender Means", by Muriel Spark. Similarly, as well, both address the moral issues arising from the tragedies. Certainly, Experiment is very different from both "Wolf Hall" and "Bring up the Bodies" in tone, mood and period.Recommended very highly.Here is the NY Times review by Margaret Atwood:http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/11...
—Ed
