An Experiment in Love

by Hilary Mantel

Book Overview

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year

It was the year after Chappaquiddick, and all spring Carmel McBain had watery dreams about the disaster. Now she, Karina, and Julianne were escaping the dreary English countryside for a London University hall of residence. Interspersing accounts of her current position as a university student with recollections of her childhood and an ever difficult relationship with her...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312426879
• ISBN13: 9780312426873
• Release Date: June 2007
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.6" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Experiencing love and other disasters

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.

--Growing up in 1960's England--

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.

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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.

Extraordinary novel -compelling yet harrowing.

"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.

Some much deserved American publicity for Mantel, at last!

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)