MILLICENT BELL
45
recollection by a newspaper photo of Julia (as Julialme has renamed her–
selQ, now a successful Highgate psychiatrist: "There was a blur where her
face should be, and yet [ noted the confident set of her arms, and I could
imagine her expression: professionally watchful, maternal, with that broad
cold smile which [ have known since [ was eleven years old."
[n the student hostel in London where these three continue their
growth towards adulthood they make other friends. One of them is
Lynette Segal who is the only daughter of a rich Oewish ' ) family. There is
something fairy-tale about her; she is beautiful and innocent and generous.
She shares her fancy candy from home and lends her fox coat, and unhesi–
tatingly pays for another girl's abortion. She puts up wi th unsympathetic
Karina as a roommate because no one else will. Julianne - who may have
had an abortion, too, but has discreetly managed things herself and is safe–
lyon the Pill - continues to grow up handsome and soignee - and studies
medicine. Carmel, scrimping on her state grant, starves herself skinny, has
a love affair which runs out, becomes anorexic - and studies law. About
Karina's ultimate destiny we can only guess.
Mantel is very good at evoking the black comedy of a subject which
in other hands would be trite - the schoolgirl and undergraduate view of
teachers and dorm mistresses and Health Service doctors, those inheritors
of the authority abdicated by parents; the uneasy jollity of unisex life and
the farcical schemes by which relation with the opposite sex is consum–
mated, the close fellowshi p of incompatible personali ties, the clash of ideas
and the response to political movements and intellectual fads, the way dis–
aster may lie in wait beneath the surface of jokes and fun and the
preoccupation with food and clothes. Tragedy does erupt when fire breaks
out in the hostel one night and the girls are rushed outside. Shivering in
their nightgowns, they watch as the flames mount through the building
and glimpse a single figure at a window, flames radiating from head and
chest. It is Lynette. At Carmel's side in the street stands Karina with the
fox coat over her arm, and a room key slips out of its pocket to the ground
before Karina puts her foot on it.
Was Karina a murderer who turned that key on Lynette
'
Carmel does
not say, nor does she comment on what might have been the sources of
such murderousness - the rage of the looked-down-upon ugly duckling
who recognizes condescension everywhere, the person at the bottom
whose heart is filled with class envy and racial hostility. [t is a staggering
ending in which the illuminated figure dying in the flames gains a mar–
tyr's status. The novel's ti tle,
An Experiment
in
Love,
is worth pondering. If
the attempt
to
love the other was Carmel's, she has surely failed.
Margaret Atwood's aim in
Alias Crace,
a book whose title also has a
religious sound, is still more obscure. This extraordinary book is a brilliant
