An Experiment in Love – Hilary Mantel

You might have seen this fantastic archive from the BBC where you can hear writers talking about their own work (I saw this originally on Thomas’s blog).   Hilary Mantel is featured talking about An Experiment in Love and I was so interested that I immediately went to the library to get it.

This book is not really an experiment in love so much as an experiment in living.  Carmel comes from a working class family in a dying town in Lancashire. This is the story of her childhood relationships with her mother, and Karina, the girl down the street, her experiences at a Catholic girls school, and how she copes with her first year at University.

I’ve read a lot of books lately where the characters have been wooden and the descriptions have been obvious.  Mantel has just the knack of telling you everything you need to know in a couple of lines:

Their mothers stayed at home to construct Battenburg cakes and cut back hydrangeas.  Their first memories were of garden ponds and weeping willows, of the wrought-iron balconies of Scarborough hotels, of the slippery leather of the the back seat of the family car.  When I think of the early lives of these girls – of Julianne, let us say – I think of starched sun-bonnets, Beatrix Potter, of mossy garden paths, regular bedtime, regular bowels: I see them frozen for ever in that unreclaimable oasis between the war and the 1960′s, between the end of rationing and the beginning of the end.

However, the men in this book are very much in the background – boyfriends are so interchangeable that they are lumped together and just called ‘Rogers’ (as the smiley, happy girls in her hall who’d rather have an engagement ring than a degree are called ‘Sophys’).  The real personalities are the women: vindictive, mysterious Karina; sardonic, worldly Julianne; and mousy, sarcastic Carmel.  Not to mention the force of nature that is Carmel’s mother.

An Experiment in Love is a black comedy which pokes fun at the absurdities of life and living.

Our convent was not like the convents that are generally described in novels.  We were not told that Our Lady would blush every time we crossed our legs.  We were not forbidden patent-leather shoes in case boys saw our knickers reflected in them.

It’s not laugh out loud funny, it’s cringe with recognition funny, especially in the bits when she talks about Labour student politicians blarghing on about equality but not letting the women get a word in edgeways and the elaborate ways in which girls sneak boys into their bedrooms.

But it gets increasingly bleaker as time goes on.  All these girls have worked so hard to get to university, but it does not prove to be the promised land that they were led to believe.  Instead, they encounter new, grim problems: no money, no food, biological instincts over-riding rational calculations.  I can’t decide whether this is a book about feminism, ambivalence about feminism, or saying that the world hasn’t changed enough for feminism to really work.  It’s a very enigmatic book – you never really know what Karina’s problem is –  and there’s always something grotesque lurking in the background.  You couldn’t love it – it is too strange for that – but it is compulsive reading.

I had extra enjoyment because of the LSE references.  Apparently it’s not changed much since the 1970′s.