An Experiment in Love

Rating:
Summary: Extraordinary novel -compelling yet harrowing.
Review: "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.

Rating:
Summary: dark
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Good start, but felt unfinished
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: --Growing up in 1960's England--
Review: 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.




Rating:
Summary: A Powerfully Stirring Novel
Review: This novel is strongly written and stunningly evocative in exploring the incongruities of young adulthood: the stern ethic youth hold their peers to, and the simultaneous obliviousness of a broader sense of scale. Like adolescence itself, the novel leaves you with a mixture of feelings, ranging from sadness to revulsion. But the themes are valid, and will be familiar to all its readers: the drama of breaking established boundaries, the piercing expression of individuality, and the sudden awareness of physically driven impulses in both love and derision. As most well written books about young adults are, "An Experiment in Love" is a story of horrors, both soft and sharp. I believe anyone who reads the book will find in it some reflection of themselves, as well as the ghosts of who they felt in youthful extremism they might become.

Rating:
Summary: self-hating rubbish
Review: What I learned from this book: thin girls are beautiful, fragile, and good; fat girls are ugly, and either stupid (Claire) or evil (Karina); Men are all the same, cookie cutter bastards; and anorexia is not an all-consuming compulsion, but the result of being too busy with your school work and embroidery (I kid you not) to remember to eat. Why read this book, when there's so much else out there?

Rating:
Summary: Some much deserved American publicity for Mantel, at last!
Review: 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)

Rating:
Summary: A mastercraftsman at work.
Review: 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).

Rating:
Summary: A mastercraftsman at work.
Review: 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).