Customer Reviews

An Experiment in Love

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"An experiment in Love" is, ultimately, a novel about the various forms of imprisionment family, society and religion can place uopn the individual.

Carmel McBain is the daughter of a lower class English family. She is imprisioned at home by a domineering mother who makes a point of "doing everything" for her daughter while chiding her for being useless. She is constrained at school by her mother's high, harsh, expectations of academic excellence. She is engulfed in between by the inescapable "friendship" proximity and her mothers desires have forced her into with a neighbor and classmate whom she doesn't care for and with whom she has nothing in common.

Her academic success lands her in a highly regarded local Catholic girls prep school where she is again paired with her "friend" and further buffeted by the expectations, traditions and social constraints cointained within that environment.

Finally, at college in London, her "friend" still in tow, along with another classmate from the prep school, Carmel, though seemingly free of the constraints that dominated her childhood, cannot, in fact, sever those bonds. She is now sufficiently free, however, to analyze her situation, as well as those of her classmates, and can see, if not overcome, the various results that these limitations and expectations have had on her and her various classmates. The effects are often severe: Sexual abandon and the consequences those acts engender in a traditional, paternalistic society; Illness (particularly anorexia); and, in the end, a particular act of revenge/release with very grave effects and consequences.

Although not a book for the faint of heart, this nevertheless stands as a extraordinary piece of storytelling and social/psychological examination of the anomie often engendered within families in our modern society.

Mantel's novel of 1960s London fairly aches with the awakening of young womanhood confronted with the incipient sexual revolution. The security of the past rejected for the prospects of a future filled with sexual freedom, the pill and control over one's body, the implications are almost staggering. For Carmel McBain, product of a strict Catholic school upbringing, the choices are daunting. Constraint built into her psyche, she attempts to balance the lessons of a painful childhood with a new identity that affords a wider view of the world at large. In contrast to her unrestricted appreciation of life's potential, albeit within monetary and class limits, Carmel's body pays the price of her family's financial situation. At no time does she enjoy the excesses of abundance, either in material goods or the amount of food she is forced to subsist on. It becomes a forced march, this rigorous schooling at Towbridge Hall, denying herself in order to achieve her goals. Barely aware of her descent, Carmel slips into the nether world of anorexia, self-denial a common condition.

Rooming with a girl who is her polar opposite, Carmel views Julianne Lipcott as the embodiment of worldliness, sporting a cavalier attitude that serves her well, Julianne afforded the luxury of watching others suffer while she looks on. The girls live out their tribulations under Julianne's observant eye, relieving her of the necessity of personal experience. Although the two girls have attended Holy Redeemer School together, a daunting feat for Carmel's elderly, bitter parents, it is the third person in this unholy trilogy that haunts Carmel's emotional development. Karina has been a burden since their earliest years, a plump, unattractive, gluttonous girl much favored by Carmel's mother. A hulking dark shadow at her side, Karina lumbers along, forever in Carmel's shadow, symbolically growing larger as Carmel literally disappears. Confronted by the ease of sexual relations and the burdens entailed, Carmel fails to achieve the abundant freedom of her roommate, emotionally vulnerable to the vagaries of first love, driven to excel while plagued with self-doubt.

Karina remains the embodiment of a murky, unhappy past, a penurious childhood riddled with Catholic guilt, a quest to find a more nurturing niche in the world and a reminder of a tragedy that suddenly illuminates one girl's ignominious deed at the cost of another. As Mantel mines the deep contradictions of Carmel's past, the protagonist's spirit fairly glows in spite of her slight frame, her perceptions of reality honed by experience and a natural intuition for honesty. Like a pale moon, Julia recedes as Carmel's tale unfolds, the burdensome visage of Karina expiated by unexpected circumstances. The prose reveals all, the terrible tensions of the sexual revolution, an awakening of female consciousness and the seductive pull of the more cautious past: "The little women inside were looking out through our eyes and waving to the world." Luan Gaines/2007.

I read AN EXPERIMENT IN LOVE because I had read FLUDD by this author and thought that it was an amazing and interesting story. Also, the reviews are quite good.

This is a very original story that makes you think and remember your own childhood. Carmel McBain, the main character is the only child of working class parents who want the best for her. Unfortunately, her mother is overbearing and almost kills the spirit and life of her daughter. Carmel is constantly told what her parents have given up for her and what their expectations are. Her life, rigidly controlled by her mother, includes the nagging pressure to always be among the top of her class. Carmel would like to participate in helping around the house and other activities, but the constraint that her mother uses won't allow it. Carmel is to spend all of her time studying so that she can be accepted in the best schools

Mrs. McBain unfairly compares Carmel to Karina, a girl from the neighborhood and Carmel's schoolmate. Karina is the daughter of immigrants and has a lot of duties and responsibilities at home. The two girls don't really like each other, but are thrown together by their mothers. Karina knows what to say to parents and teachers, but to Carmel she is vicious and nasty. She's a person who we've all met somewhere in our lives, who tell those in authority exactly what they want to hear and then makes snide remarks to their peers.

Carmel makes other friends, but Karina is always lurking in the background of her life. Unfortunately, she's saddled with Karina for most of her school years. Carmel suffers more than her share of the agonies of growing up. Eventually, something has to give and it does with a sad price.

It's one of those books that the reader gets the idea about what's going on, but nothing is ever completely explained. I have a thousand questions that I'd like to ask the author.

Hilary Mantel's "An Experiment in Love" is a strange novel. Not that it is bad - it is just strange. It is about a group of girls who move to London in the late 1960s to go to the university. It is also about the changing times, and what it brings to their lives. Narrated by the protagonist, Carmel McBain, this is a story of reminiscences, of remembrance things past, in a Proustian way.

Mantel bends past and present in her narrative tying both ends of Carmel's life. The common figure is her friend, Karina. Not they are really friends, it is that their lives are linked, no matter how much the narrator didn't wanted it to be. There is a sense of guilty surrounding her. Her life has always been better than Karina's, who still manages to get into the same university and follow Carmel from their small country town to the big city. Karina is not only Carmel's nemesis, but somehow, her doppelganger.

In her precise prose, Mantel details how lives come together with ties stronger than ourselves. Carmel may not want Karina stealing her life, nevertheless, the narrator can't help it. Throughout the narrative, we wonder what makes good people be good. Or, even more, what is a good person? How can it be defined? And, therefore, what is a bad person? Is there a reason to be good or bad? "An Experiment in Love" is not a book to bring answers, but to raise interesting questions.

I devoured this book in about a day. I found it literary, witty, and darkly fascinating. The people and places Mantel brings to life here evoked my own Catholic upbringing and school years. I bought the book because of the review Margaret Atwood gave it (printed on the cover), and it well deserved her lavish praise.

That said, I wanted there to be more. It felt like reading the beginning of a book, or like listening to someone tell me the first part of a history, and then suffering an interruption that leaves the story hanging. I felt it was unfinished, and I would gladly have read another 250 pages of this book, had they been there to read.

When I discovered this book last year and began to read it, I felt after only ten pages the relief one gets when one can relax into the embrace of a true mastercraftsman. Mantel never lets the reader down here. Superbly skilled in creating relentless, razor sharp images of lower middleclass family life, of personally thwarted parents with bigger goals for their children, and of striving and desperately motivated young people, Mantel will, for many readers, succeed in conjuring up some of their own nightmares of youth and school life. Oft recognized by the British with innumerable prizes and awards, Mantel is deservedly considered to be "the novelist of her generation who will achieve lasting greatness" (Literary Review)

This is a novel about female cruelty, and I can see why Margaret Atwood praised it so highly (it came out around the time of The Robber Bride, which centres on a hateful character).
Like other readers, I have a thousand unanswered questions and would love to ask Mantel what she intended.
But basically, I see it as a portrait of female evil. It was fascinating and I read it in one go and am now eager to read much, much more Mantal.
But it's not amusing or witty or satiric, it draws blood on every page. So be prepared.

With her consummate story-telling skills, Mantel never lets the reader down here. Superbly talented in creating relentless, razor sharp images of lower middleclass family life, of personally thwarted parents with bigger goals for their children, and of striving and desperately motivated young people, Mantel will, for many readers, succeed in conjuring up some of their own nightmares of youth and school life. Oft recognized by the British with innumerable prizes and awards, Mantel deserves to be considered to be "the novelist of her generation who will achieve lasting greatness" (Literary Review).

A number of things about this coming of age novel bother me, but thanks to the writing I enjoyed it. I recently read Mantel's Wolf Hall, which I loved, and it is remarkable how different the author's style is in the two books, each style suitable for its subject matter.

(Spoiler Alert). While I called this a coming of age novel, it is more the story of what shattered Carmel's ambitions. Carmel was under intense money pressure, yet it is not clear to me what caused her anorexia, as she seemed mentally healthy in other respects. I suppose we are to pair her anorexia with Karina's gluttony, but I don't think either illuminates the other. Karina seems more of a foil than anything else. It is very strange that you could lock a dorm room from the outside, such that a person inside (Lynette) would need a key to get out. The novel is interested in class and society's attitude to women, but at least in the US, I cannot match up society's attitude and the decade in which it is set (Chappiquiddic occurred in 1969 so they entered college in 1970).

Everyone seems to have a different opinion as to what this book is "about." It is my opinion that "An Experiment in Love" is the story of faith destroyed by intellectualism. I think Carmel's spirituality, when it is given no outlet, literally consumes her. Anyway. I hesitate to say that this book should be required reading for everyone, but I think a particular kind of person would like it very much. I feel that Mantel has told my own story better than I ever could (not the anorexia; the loss of faith). Her voice is stark and bleak and poetic, and it disturbed me-- a seventeen year old girl who is religious by nature, but skeptical by conviction-- for reasons that I do not quite understand.