44
PARTISAN REVIEW
England whose starting point is well outside the world of established priv–
ilege,
though more decidedly working class, and Irish Catholic instead of
Protestant or agnostic. Fifteen or more years after Frederica, Carmel also
makes it to the University - London rather than Cambridge - where her
crisis of self-definition occurs. No less than Byatt's heroine, she must dis–
cover who she is in terms of the social categories of gender and class.
Mantel's first-person narrative is terse and a little mysterious, suggest–
ing much more than it admits to; her heroine's language expresses a
sardonic poetic vision. Life began, she remembers, in a depressed textile
town where the mill, "struggled on with antiquated machinery, which it
was not worth the cost of replacing; the workers too were aging, and by
the time of my middle childhood were a parody of themselves, a south–
erner's idea of the north. Under the factory walls of pI um-coloured brick,
stained black from the smoke and daily rain, plodded thick-set men in bib
and brace, with shorn hair and flat caps: and angry-looking women in
checkered head-scarves, with elastic stockings and shoes like boats.
Beyond the mill chimneys, you could see the line of hills." The McBains
just scrape along on her father's salary as a clerk but her mother ("She had
a firm jaw, and a loud carrying voice. Her hair was greying and wild and
held back with springing kirby grips. When she frowned, a cloud passed
over the street. When she raised her eyebrows - as she often did, amazed
each hour by what God expected her to endure - a small town's tram sys–
tem sprang up on her forehead") is intensely ambitious for this daughter,
dresses her in pretentious home-sewn clothes and skewers her to her stud–
ies. Carmel gets admitted to a genteel convent school and passes the
entrance exams for the university.
With her on this journey of upward mobility are two companions.
Karina's family is East European refugee - Carmel is never sure of the
exact nationality ("Polish, Ukranian, Estonian?"), but something far more
alien than Irish. They can hardly speak English and work relief shifts in
the mills. Mrs. McBain patronizes them and coerces Carmel to look after
sullen Karina. But Karina needs no looking after. A tough little sphinx
with her own eye on getting ahead, she simpers at her teachers, is her
mother's prop at home, and snickers at her rivals - and she, too, passes all
the exams. Carmel's attitude is one of mixed hatred and guilt; in nursery
school she had let herself go to the point of kicking Karina's doll; forever
after she felt obliged to be this ultimate outsider's best friend. Carmel's
closer friend at the convent school and the university is, however, Julianne,
who is middle-class, intelligent and articulate, a sophisticated mentor who
has already rejected religion and accepted active sex and feminism - the
person she wants to be rather than, like Karina, the person she fears to
resemble. As the grown-up Carmel begins her narrative, she is jogged into
