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An Experiment in Love: A Novel
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...more
Paperback, 256 pages
Published
June 12th 2007
by Picador
(first published 1994)
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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 f...more
Carmel reflects back on her life, prompted by a newspaper article about a f...more
This was a fine novel for me. The writing and the story telling are so bright and fast-moving I didn't want to put it down.
The tale follows Carmel from her girlhood through a demanding Catholic school for 11-18-years olds, and into her college times in London. There is plenty of flavoring in this this Irish-Catholic background, and in the sense of poverty of pocket book and ideas of some of the characters, in the class issues and and in the sense of the times and places that are vas...more
The tale follows Carmel from her girlhood through a demanding Catholic school for 11-18-years olds, and into her college times in London. There is plenty of flavoring in this this Irish-Catholic background, and in the sense of poverty of pocket book and ideas of some of the characters, in the class issues and and in the sense of the times and places that are vas...more
The writing in this short book captured and held me, even though the plot had little intrinsic interest for me. It's the experience of a working-class Catholic girl from the north of England being pushed into academic success by her ambitious mother in the late 1960s to 1970. It's a somber and sad first-person story, even though the narrator has reached, by the time of the writing, some form of happiness, integrity, and maturity. There are flashes everywhere of early feminism, social satire, Cat...more
Judy
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review of another edition
Recommends it for:
readers who liked Wolf Hall
Shelves:
20th-century-fiction
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...more
The three star rating is no reflection on the writing or the material. Mantel is a brilliant novelist, the kind who can convey a great deal with spare dialogue and a cleverly observed detail. It's just that I read her "Wolf Hall" first, and that book is such a masterpiece, that this intimate story seems a small book in comparison. It is almost as if a very good short story or novella had been expanded to fill the pagination requirements of a novel. The book concerns a group of female s...more
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I enjoyed this book, the prose is good. It has many themes, friendship, jealousy, love, sex, fashion, anorexia and death. The book captures well the school days and time at university for a young woman in England in the 60's and 70's. It also describes how education facilitated changes in society in the period of early feminism and the working class/middle class divide and ultimately how it didn't. I did find the character of Carmel, the main protaganist, somewhat unconstant and I am not sure ...more
It took until the end for this book to really come together for me - but the end put everything in perspective and made me enjoy the book much more. It is a book about the relationships between women during an historical era in which expectations are changing about what women can and should do, and how they should behave. It is also a time in these particular women's lives when they are shaping their adult identities and sorting out how to respond to the changing norms of society. My college exp...more
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This took so long for something to happen - girls at school; girls in halls of residence; girls at school; girls in halls of residence; girls at... If it weren't for the mean girls, and the nasty mothers I might have fallen asleep before I got to the midway point. But then somehow I suddenly got into it. I nearly, literally [yes Tim] bumped into Sarah whilst reading it on my walk to work. I had to know what happened to Sue, Carmel, Julia, Karina but most of all Lynette. It was flawed at the end ...more
I read this book after reading the Booker prize behemouth "Wolf Hall," which I loved. This is set predominately in 1960s London at a girls college. It's wonderful and complicated and nuanced and slow (like "Wolf Hall," "An Experiment in Love" took me more time to read than its pages fully accounted for). It's a coming of age novel, but not a trite one. There are very dark angles that Mantel utilizes but never fully shines her light on. Which leaves the reader wonde...more
I love Hilary Mantel's writing and after A Time of Changes and Wolf Hall, I'm gradually catching up with her earlier work. She has an incredibly acute observational gift; a wonderful skill with characterisation. This is an absorbing tale of three bright convent-educated girls from Roman Catholic families who go on to University in London in the sixties and live in the same hall of residence. It evokes a particular time, place and culture very convincingly, although the ending left me slightly...more
A nice coming-of-age novel with some interesting shifts in time and setting throughout, but it never pulled me in. Much of the book focuses on a girl coping with anxiety towards school, growing up and encroaching anorexia. The pacing is incredibly slow, with most of the action popping up in the final 20 pages of the novel. The final "event" itself is compelling, but I had kind of given up on the novel by that point. Maybe Carmel is more relatable to a female audience, but I couldn't se...more
Loved it. Simple, elegant, absorbing. I want more books like this. And I love Hilary Mantel's writing. Indeed, my only gripe is that I could have happily read twice as much. I wanted more, more, more.
I liked Carmel's viewpoint - troubled, female, first person narrators being just what I'm generally looking for. And the imagery and descriptions were so vivid - Carmel's flower sweater that she creates, the fox fur, Karina's hairy sweaters that she washed by hand...hmm, maybe it was jus...more
I liked Carmel's viewpoint - troubled, female, first person narrators being just what I'm generally looking for. And the imagery and descriptions were so vivid - Carmel's flower sweater that she creates, the fox fur, Karina's hairy sweaters that she washed by hand...hmm, maybe it was jus...more
Hilary Mantel never wastes a word, and it's only at the end of this brief book (as opposed to her Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall, at 500-plus pages, anyway)that you realize how expertly she has woven every line and observation. She excels, in all her books, at the portrayal of not-so-likable people, and keeping the reader interested in them even as they're repelled. She said recently, when asked what advice she'd give to aspiring writers: "Drop the charm. Eat meat, drink blood." She me...more
Because I liked Wolf Hall so much I looked for more of her books. This is a slight but interesting novel about relationships within a group of women undergraduates in London in the late 60s, some of whom have history from earlier schools. I was really upset by a decision one of them made at the very end, which shows you how well the characters were described. Real enough to care about.
One slapsticky thing I didn't like (someone vomiting onto a letter which renders it unreadable) but ot...more
One slapsticky thing I didn't like (someone vomiting onto a letter which renders it unreadable) but ot...more
Hilary Mantel writes beautifully, but in such a cryptic manner that I had no idea where the book was going until I was about two-thirds through. This is the fourth book I've read by Hilary Mantel, and probably the most mysterious of the bunch. I'm not really sure what to make of the ending. I suspect it's one of those books which you have to read more than once for it to reveal itself to you.
The novel is a coming-of-age story narrated by Carmel McBain, a poor Irish-Catholic girl growin...more
The novel is a coming-of-age story narrated by Carmel McBain, a poor Irish-Catholic girl growin...more
I found this book on a remainder shelf and bought it because I'd just read and was SO impressed with her WOLF HALL. This is very different, but still quite excellent. One of the aspects I like a lot about her writing is that she doesn't think her readers are idiots and need to have everything explained.
Kate hadn't even considered how much worse the educational system in Britain is, here we deal with teachers, there boarding school really raises its ugly head. This was interesting but puzzling, anorexia combined with scholarship and the British caste system. It felt very British.
why: the cloud on Flork told me this is an author I'd like. I'm not up for the 500+-page "A Place of Greater Safety," so I'd like to try this one. Also, the pressures on women in early 1960's London interest me.
a starter book by a writer who's now hitting her stride. Like Michael Chabon's "Mysteries of Pittsburgh," the young characters just aren't as interesting to the reader as they are to themselves.
I wanted this book to be about 50% longer, which I guess is a good sign, really? It was beautifully written, but left me unsatisfied. READ WOLF HALL.
Huh. I'm really puzzled by all the positive reviews. I really liked A Place of Greater Safety, and I'm looking forward to reading Wolf Hall, but this book really disappointed me. It's vague, bland, and nothing really happens. I suppose maybe there are some subtle undercurrents reflecting on women's lives in the 60s, but I guess they were too subtle for me. I felt like I never got to know the characters or even the basic of what was happening in their lives, and there was no real narrative struct...more
An amazing story of a young girl in her first year of college looking back on her life as she continues going on with her college life.
Vaguely reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's Cats Eye, and pretty unremarkable really, but an easy read and very well written.
This was a test run for Wolf Hall, which I will most certainly dive into now ... and her dozen or so other titles after that.
As my mother said when she recommended it to me, "It's very English, and disturbing, you'll like it." And I did.
Because of Zadie:
http://emdashes.com/2009/03/syllabus-col...
http://emdashes.com/2009/03/syllabus-col...
This book captues the experience of going to university in the mid 1960s.
Ought perhaps to have been entitled 'An Experiment in Cowardice'.
Blech. I wanted to read Wolf Hall but now I'm not sure.
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Hilary Mantel was born in Glossop, Derbyshire, England on 6 July 1952. She studied Law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University. She was employed as a social worker, and lived in Botswana for five years, followed by four years in Saudi Arabia, before returning to Britain in the mid-1980s. In 1987 she was awarded the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for an article about Jeddah, and sh...more
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“I was the subject of an experiment in love. I lived my life under her gaze, undergoing certain trials for her so that she would not have to undergo them for herself. But, how are our certainties forged, except by the sweat and tears of other people? If your parents don't teach you how to live; you learn it from books; and clever people watch you learn from your mistakes. ”
—
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