Mark suggested this American novel about a young girl who becomes involved with a cult based on the real-life Manson group who in 1968 murdered guests, including the film star Sharon Tate, at the home of film director Roman Polanski. A best-seller, due no doubt in no small measure to its sensational subject matter, the book is also rightly highly praised for its vivid, evocative and fluid prose style, and we did indeed all find it a compelling read.
Evie, the first-person narrator, looks back in the 80s to the summer of 1968 when, aged fourteen and living with her divorced and preoccupied mother, bored in the summer holidays and whiling away the time before she is sent to boarding school, she encounters a group of girls belonging to the cult, and is soon drawn into their circle.
The novel opens in stunning prose, with the image of the girls moving through the park, and their effect on everyone around them:
These long-haired girls seemed to glide above all that was happening around them, tragic and separate. Like royalty in exile... All their cheap rings like a second set of knuckles. They were messing with an uneasy threshold, prettiness and ugliness at the same time, and a ripple of awareness followed them through the park.
Evie is soon stealing from her absent mother's purse for the group and making daily visits to their ranch, and it isn't long before she moves in. The novel charts brilliantly Evie's progression from enchantment with the group and its lifestyle and cod philosophy of community and sharing to disillusion and the realisation that the charismatic Manson figure, Russell, is a controlling, indeed vicious and ultimately petulant narcissist who holds everyone in the group in his power. Slower but more devastating is her realisation that Susan, the girl with whom she is most fascinated and begins by hero-worshipping, is vulnerable and utterly trapped by Russell.
This is a debut novel and Emma Cline is a young author, and everyone in our group expressed admiration that she was able to capture so well the atmosphere and ethos of the 60s.
The main, and potent, message of the book is the lack of power of young girls in our society. It is their lack of power in the real world that leads to their involvement in a cult apparently offering a more equitable way of life, and it is of course their supreme lack of power within that group that will lead to their following Russell's instructions to carry out his revenge murders. In the end, Evie is not present at the murders, which is why now, in the 80s, unlike the other female cult members she is free - although psychologically scarred for life - and, at the time she is remembering it all, she is staying at a friends' house in his absence. The friend's son and his girlfriend turn up and it becomes clear to Evie that the girlfriend is just as lacking in power in relation to the son, indeed subservient to him, as any girl would have been back in 1968. Things have not changed.
In our discussion, I said that for me the book hadn't answered a fundamental question: while they were clearly in Russell's thrall, how could the girls have brought themselves to carry out the murders? Others said, Well, psychologists couldn't find out from the girls themselves in the real life case, but I felt it was the job of the novelist to work the psychology. In fact, looking back at the novel now, I see that Cline does provide an explicit explanation. Evie thinks back to the times she was abused as a young girl, and the sheer hatred it raised in her. It is indeed the powerlessness, she thinks, that would fuel the violence: 'The hatred that vibrated beneath the surface of my girl's face... Of course my hand would anticipate the weight of a knife.'
We weren't unstinting in our praise. Just about everybody felt that, after the vivid and enthralling beginning, the book took a long time to get going again as it established the situation that primes Evie for her rebellion: the sterility and boredom of her middle-class life with an unhappy mother, and the events that lead up to her best friend ending their friendship and leaving her at a loose end and lonely. I felt that this section of the novel, though so very well written and ringing very true, felt too familiar, that I'd read too many similar portrayals of American middle-class teenagehood. I also said there were a couple of longueurs: the descriptions of life with Evie's father and stepmother after her mother finds out what
she's been up to and sends her away (and from which she escapes back to the ranch), and of life in the boarding school after she is finally severed from the cult. Others agreed. I also said that although I was very taken by the prose as a whole, the use of strings of short verbless sentences, though mostly vivid in effect, seemed after a while to turn into a tic bordering on affectation, and as far as I remember some people agreed.
And that is all I can remember of our discussion, which in fact is a lot more than I expected to be able to.
Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here
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