SOURCE: “Not Nice Girls,” in Times Literary Supplement, February 24, 1995, p. 22.

In the following review, O'Faolain finds parallels between An Experiment in Love and Muriel Spark's The Girls of Slender Means.

Hilary Mantel is a darkly inventive storyteller who has in the past dealt ruthlessly with, among other targets, unhappy families, the social services, the Roman Catholic Church and the French Revolution. Her fictions blaze with satiric vision. Her tone is usually cool and her stance detached.

Her new novel, however, is narrated in the first person by its protagonist, Carmel, who, since she is telling her own story, risks paying a price for indulging in too fierce a satire: she may lose sympathy. Not that first-person narrators have to be likeable. Think of Humbert Humbert.

An Experiment in Love is a coming-of-age novel, a story of three Catholic girls for whom we are surely meant to care—and...