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41does not. There were blank shots instead - they make a considerable part of the woman’s memories and of her anxiety about tomorrow.
The strong sentiment dominating the stoiy makes for the happy-end high expectancy (the good old “rules of the genre”). Swift does not provide one. Yet neither does he block it off: we are not going to learn what has happened ‘tomorrow’. The open ending here, though, is nothing like the open or multiple endings in John Fowles’ 'The Magus’ or ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’ or in Peter Ackroyd’s 'Chatterton'. It is an Open Ending Traditional, existing, apart from plentiful other cases, in some of earlier Swift’s novels - as well as in Dickens’ ‘Great Expectations with or without a Bulwer-Lytton for a prompting friend, the Happy End must have its chance.
By no means it’s a difficult novel. A true and authentic one however. And what sheer pleasure!
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Sandie Byrne Oxford University
Thoughts on An Experiment in Love by Hilary Mantel
An Experiment in Love is an unsettling novel whose ending, shocking, horrifying, powerful, yet unresolved, is haunting. It has, superficially, a straightforward, simple, and even hackneyed plot: the progress of a young woman from working-class origins to a life-style once reserved for the middle class; the acquisition of education and connections at the expense of family and cultural ties; the oppressions and repressions of a narrowly-practiced religion. The simplicity is deceptive; this story leaves questions and disturbing images resonating long after its end.
The strangeness of the novel begins with its title. What is the experiment? In the story of a young woman at the age to see love as the beginning and end and all of life, where is the love? The narrative
structure adds to the unsettling effect. The chronology of the plot is dual, moving forward both from the time when the central protagonist arrives in the University of London hostel for women, and from her childhood in a northern town. Only gradually do we sense a chill creeping in to the seemingly mundane setting and seemingly mundane characters. The narrative voice is that of Carmel McBain, whom we meet as a Catholic school girl aimed by her ambitious mother at a prestigious Catholic convent school for girls, and forced into a close relationship which is not friendship with the newly-arrived Karina. Held up to Carmel as an ideal friend and model, Karina is carping, cruel, and hyper-critical; never allowing the smallest triumph, victory or joy in Carmel’s life to pass unslighted or not undermined.
Carmel is intelligent and perceptive, but almost entirely lacking in autonomy. Her life is shaped, ordered, and channeled by those endowed with different kinds of power: older people; people of higher status; people in authority; men. She observes acutely and narrates dispassionately. She notes but does not overtly judge, the single-minded, unloving mother who uses her as a vehicle; the resigned, disempowered, detached father, who will not lift a finger for her; the emigre woman who feeds her daughter, Karina, like a fowl fattened for the table; the snobbish nuns of the private school; the dauntingly self-confident and outspoken ex-class-mate and present room-mate at the hostel which she and Karina enter after leaving school. From none of these does Carmel receive love. She is kept apart from the children of her primary school, other than Karina, by her mother and her religion, from the pupils at the private school by her social class, from the other students in London by her provincial origins, and, finally, from her home, when her mother cuts her off after she chooses to spend Christmas with her boyfriend.
In the hostel, Carmel does find fellowship with some of her fellow students, and both gives and receives support. Kindness comes particularly from the universally and unceasingly good and generous Claire, but never from Karina, who remains as sly, manipulative, and cruel as ever. Though ostensibly training for a profession, independence, and equality, the girls are conditioned to put acquisition
of these second to that of the badge of having acquired the love of a man, the engagement ring. For this, they trade their time, their energies, their futures, and their bodies.
As the impoverished and increasingly anorexic Carmel, possessing little and consuming less, shrinks in both physical presence and effectuality, so the avidly consuming Karina grows. A fur coat belonging to Claire becomes a central signifier in the novel. Loaned among the group of friends, it represents sensual pleasure, comfort, and luxury, a place where all three are scarce commodities, and confers a rare sense of her own viability and even attractiveness, on Carmel. Her visiting boyfriend, however, reacts to her new-found and fleeting confidence by rejecting her.
Mantel takes the denouement of Muriel Spark’s ‘ Girls of Slender Means' and makes it more graphic, more horrifying, and more truly appalling. Spark’s slender girls all fit through a narrow aperture to escape a fire, apart from the large girl, the girl who could not fit into the Schiaparelli dress loaned between the others, who cannot squeeze through, does not escape. Mantel’s girls are all summoned away from the fire in the hostel by an alarm, and all leave in good time, except for slender, kind Claire, whose door is locked, and the large girl, her advanced pregnancy glimpsed beneath Claire’s fur coat, has the key in her pocket. Claire dies, horrifically, framed ,by a window, and witnessed by Carmel.
The novel ends strangely and indeterminately, with a glimpse of Carmel as an older woman; with clues suggestion that she has a comfortable middle-class life-style; that she has abandoned a career in the law; with no hint that she has revealed her suspicions about Karina; with hints that she has taken refuge in material objects, and consumption.
