Hilary Mantel's seventh novel examines the pressures on women during the 1960s to excel--but not be too successful--in England's complex hierarchy of class and status. Pushed by a domineering mother, Carmel McBain climbs her way through the pecking order and ends up at London University as an acquiescent and undernourished teenager, achieving the status so desired by her mother, but too weak to make use of it or pose a threat to anyone. Though this is Carmel's story, it reflects on a generation of girls desiring the power of men, but fearful of abandoning what is expected and proper.


From Publishers Weekly
Carmel McBain is a bright Lancashire-Irish child whose mother is fond of telling her, "your father's not just a clerk, you know"-though, in fact, he is. As Carmel grows up, this snobbish tendency metamorphoses into the brutal driving force of the girl's young life. As a teenager, with ambition bullied into her, she alternates between nights spent locked in her room to study and days filled with the "routine sarcasms of nuns." Carmel's move from posh convent to London university is a lonely one; at school, she undergoes a disturbing loss of self-awareness. Between her mother's ruthlessness and the cruelties of the nuns, Carmel's self-worth has been damaged, with near fatal results. Mantel's seventh novel (but only her second to appear here, after A Place of Greater Safety, 1993) is a powerful coming-of-age story that meticulously highlights the patterns of self-inflicted cruelty sometimes taught to young women. It perfectly conveys the confusion of one contemporary Catholic girl, and provides a subtly moving take on the mystery of anorexia nervosa. Despite its grim subject, the writing, replete with sharp humor and evocative details of 1960s England, is never self-indulgent. Irony prevails stoutly over sentimentality, while the finale delivers a surprising twist of horror that will shake readers to the core. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Although Mantel is well known and highly praised in England, this is only the second of her seven novels (following A Place of Greater Safety, LJ 2/15/93) to be published in the United States. As it begins, middle-aged, affluent suburbanite Carmel McBain sees a photo of her college roommate in the morning paper and flashes back to her first day at university, where she is asked to choose between the other two Holy Redeemer graduates attending her college. She picks Julianna, a popular and pampered girl, over her fellow scholarship student, Karina. Carmel's "experiment in love" is multifaceted. It begins with her mother's desire to change the working-class Catholic girl from Lancaster into a typical English lady-an experiment that both succeeds and fails, as each of Carmel's successes widens the chasm between mother and daughter. The young college women also experiment with love and sex, as members of the first generation to claim the Pill as their birthright, and with sisterhood as they explore the relationship between self-interest and care of their neighbors. The plot is not linear, moving from contemporary times to Carmel's college years and before, but the writing is concise and touching. One is left hoping for a sequel about these intriguing characters. Recommended for popular collections.Debbie Bogenschutz, Cincinnati Technical Coll.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review
With all its brilliance, its sharpness and its clear-eyed wit, An Experiment in Love is a haunting book.


From The Boston Review
Carmel McBain, the Anglo-Catholic narrator of Hilary Mantel's seventh novel, calls it a story about appetite-the appetite of girls from social and religious backgrounds in which it is customary to thwart female ambition and desire. This coming of age novel renders the narrow world of convent school-aertex blouses, Lourdes medals, the "queasy mass of processed peas and tinned apricots" for lunch-in precise and oppressive detail. Carmel tries to move beyond all that, but feels ambivalent too, and struggles with anorexia before settling into suburban housewifery. There is little comfort to be taken from the story of Carmel's ultimately uncertain efforts to make a place for herself that is free of the isolation and jealousy of familiar class-bound England, but Mantel's lovely prose and dark humor, together with her irony and her hard-headed view of the tragedies of childhood, make this a stunning book. Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved.


From AudioFile
There's little love in this absorbing story of two English schoolgirls, Carmel and Karina, friends of necessity, but not of the heart. They escape from unsupportive working-class families, first to convent school and then to university in late-'60's London, where they edge toward self-destruction. As the girls' circle of friends widens, Walter's characterizations paint each woman distinctly, and she does her best with the underdeveloped male characters. Both author and narrator are superb at rendering descriptive detail, especially in the evocative, meandering early chapters. J.E.T. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
"My father was a clerk; I knew this from quite early in life because of my mother's habit of saying, `Your father's not just a clerk you know.'" So begins the prolific Mantel's acerbic coming-of-age tale, which traces Carmel McBain's rocky ascent from the depressed mill town of Lancashire to prestigious London University. Her first act on arriving at the university dorm is to choose upper-class, free-spirited Julia as a roommate, rejecting her working-class childhood friend, the implacable, blunt-spoken Karina. Carmel means to leave behind her complicated relationship with Karina--based on mutual insults, envy, and one-upmanship--and to remake herself. But her pivotal transformation occurs during one disastrous term in which her boyfriend breaks up with her, she collapses from anorexia, and a fire in her dorm kills a close friend--a fire she suspects was started by Karina. Written in a dry, ironical style, Mantel's bleak novel captures the pressure-cooker atmosphere of an elite university and the indelible bonds imposed by social class. Joanne Wilkinson


From Kirkus Reviews
An angry novel by Mantel (A Place of Greater Safety, 1993, etc.), offers a powerful, but incomplete, portrait of a young woman driving herself toward destruction. Narrator Carmel McBain traces her crabbed, anxious life from childhood in Lancashire up to college in London in the 1960's. Her parents are Irish immigrants, her father affable and distant, her mother furious, accusatory, manipulative. She relentlessly prods her daughter to succeed, and Carmel, intelligent and pliable, does: She wins a place in a posh convent school and eventually a scholarship to London. Meanwhile, Katrina, the stolid, bright, cruel daughter of a neighbor, shadows Carmel's life, always competing with her, following her first to the convent school and then to London. And Julia, Carmel's friend and roommate at the university, is elegant, insouciant, at 18 already juggling a series of well-heeled boyfriends. Mantel's portrait of these girls, and more generally of the lives of young women in the unsettled `60's, is sharp and convincing: Their brittle, witty talk, their struggle to fight for true careers, their difficulty navigating a new world of sexual possibilities, are all rendered here in vivid detail. And the self-hating Carmel's quiet descent into anorexia is traced with almost clinical exactitude. There's a much-foreshadowed climactic scene in which Carmel's dormitory burns down and Lysette, Katrina's roommate, dies. (Carmel suspects that the ever-envious and angry Katrina locked her in their room before fleeing.) Then, rather bafflingly, there's a perfunctory final chapter in which a much- older Carmel, cured of her anorexia and married, looks back on these events. We never learn how she came to grips with her furies, though, or even what has happened to the loathsome Katrina. It may be that Mantel wants to suggest that such things don't matter because so little has changed: Women are still without much true authority. Still, without some conclusive image, we're left guessing about the greater meanings behind this grim, profoundly moving work. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
"With all its brilliance, its sharpness and its clear-eyed wit, An Experiment in Love is a haunting book. "-Margaret Atwood, The New York Times Book Review

"In the end, you just wish that this brutal, bracing novel were longer. "-The New Yorker



Review
"With all its brilliance, its sharpness and its clear-eyed wit, An Experiment in Love is a haunting book. "-Margaret Atwood, The New York Times Book Review

"In the end, you just wish that this brutal, bracing novel were longer. "-The New Yorker



Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book

A coming-of-age story and a piercing look at the social pretensions and youthful betrayals of a Catholic girlhood.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Carmel McBain is the only child of working-class Irish-Catholic parents. Her mother aspires to something more for her than what life in their depressed mill town has to offer. She is ambitious for her daughter, determined that she slip through England's rigid social barriers. And so, early on, she pushes Carmel, first to gain a scholarship to the local convent school, then to sit the exams for a place at London University. And Carmel does not disappoint. But success carries with it a fearful price. It sets her on a lonely journey that will take her as far as possible from where she began, uprooting her from the ties of class and place, of family and faith. Uprooting her ultimately from her own self. A coming-of-age novel, a memoir of a Catholic childhood, a piercing and witty look at social pretensions, a story of lost possibilities and girlhood betrayals: perhaps only a novelist of Hilary Mantel's enormous talents could have taken such material and shaped it into so fresh and arresting a tale.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Carmel McBain is a bright Lancashire-Irish child whose mother is fond of telling her, "your father's not just a clerk, you know"-though, in fact, he is. As Carmel grows up, this snobbish tendency metamorphoses into the brutal driving force of the girl's young life. As a teenager, with ambition bullied into her, she alternates between nights spent locked in her room to study and days filled with the "routine sarcasms of nuns." Carmel's move from posh convent to London university is a lonely one; at school, she undergoes a disturbing loss of self-awareness. Between her mother's ruthlessness and the cruelties of the nuns, Carmel's self-worth has been damaged, with near fatal results. Mantel's seventh novel (but only her second to appear here, after A Place of Greater Safety, 1993) is a powerful coming-of-age story that meticulously highlights the patterns of self-inflicted cruelty sometimes taught to young women. It perfectly conveys the confusion of one contemporary Catholic girl, and provides a subtly moving take on the mystery of anorexia nervosa. Despite its grim subject, the writing, replete with sharp humor and evocative details of 1960s England, is never self-indulgent. Irony prevails stoutly over sentimentality, while the finale delivers a surprising twist of horror that will shake readers to the core. (May)

Library Journal

Although Mantel is well known and highly praised in England, this is only the second of her seven novels (following A Place of Greater Safety, LJ 2/15/93) to be published in the United States. As it begins, middle-aged, affluent suburbanite Carmel McBain sees a photo of her college roommate in the morning paper and flashes back to her first day at university, where she is asked to choose between the other two Holy Redeemer graduates attending her college. She picks Julianna, a popular and pampered girl, over her fellow scholarship student, Karina. Carmel's "experiment in love" is multifaceted. It begins with her mother's desire to change the working-class Catholic girl from Lancaster into a typical English lady-an experiment that both succeeds and fails, as each of Carmel's successes widens the chasm between mother and daughter. The young college women also experiment with love and sex, as members of the first generation to claim the Pill as their birthright, and with sisterhood as they explore the relationship between self-interest and care of their neighbors. The plot is not linear, moving from contemporary times to Carmel's college years and before, but the writing is concise and touching. One is left hoping for a sequel about these intriguing characters. Recommended for popular collections.-Debbie Bogenschutz, Cincinnati Technical Coll.

AudioFile - Janet E. Tarasovic

There's little love in this absorbing story of two English schoolgirls, Carmel and Karina, friends of necessity, but not of the heart. They escape from unsupportive working-class families, first to convent school and then to university in late-'60's London, where they edge toward self-destruction. As the girls' circle of friends widens, Walter's characterizations paint each woman distinctly, and she does her best with the underdeveloped male characters. Both author and narrator are superb at rendering descriptive detail, especially in the evocative, meandering early chapters. J.E.T. cAudioFile, Portland, Maine

Margaret Atwood

This is a story about emotional Kung Fu, female style -- except that by the end, although all are wounded or worse, there is no clear winner....An Experiment in Love is a haunting book. -- The New York Times Book Review

Michael Upchurch