an experiment in love

An Experiment in Love by Hilary Mantel (Penguin, 1996)

A smart, engaging book, reminiscent of Margaret Drabble’s Jerusalem, The Golden (one of my favorite Drabble novels), that ultimately failed to satisfy me.  Carmel, our heroine, escapes her lower-class, provincial, northern past and enters the glittering and glamorous world of London.  She has two friends: the rich and beautiful Julianne, and the poor and ugly Karina, and orbits like a moon around them both.  The book shuttles back and forth between flashbacks of their Catholic girlhood (all three attended a school called The Holy Redeemer) and scenes from their first year at University of London, and Mantel does a good job of creating a complete and complex picture of both past and present.  The three girls live in a woman’s dormitory in Bloomsbury, a sorty of female hothouse, and Mantel’s description of this overwrought world is excellent.  Unfortunately the book ends (somewhat abruptly)  with an unexplained and therefore seemingly arbitrary fire, which destroys the dormitory and kills one of their fellow inhabitants — or was it murder?  This ending, plus a framing sequence set many  years in the future, doesn’t correspond with the carefully observed and complexly rendered world of the book, and therefore is a major disappointment.