Books: The Right Kind of Virgin

THE UNICORN GIRL by Caroline Glyn. 192 pages. Coward-McCann. $4.

There seems to be no letup in Britain’s export of talented kids: first the pop singers, then the clothing designers, now a precocious novelist who will be around for a long time. At 19, Caroline Glyn, a great-granddaughter of Elinor Glyn, is technically a teenager, but in skill and imagination she is a veteran. Her first novel, Don’t Knock the Corners Off, was a winning, blithe schoolgirl adventure that knocked all four corners off an English education—and she was 15 when she wrote it. In her third novel, Oldtimer Glyn looks again into the recent past and examines the chimerical age of 13 in an upsetting setting: a Girl Guide summer camp. For this delightful slip of a book, Glyn gets four gold stars and a merit badge.

Her heroine is Fullie, who is convinced that she turns into a tree on fine spring nights and hasn’t a single human friend in the world. She goes to camp hoping to find a few, but of course finds herself instead. A ragtag regiment of girls from eleven to 13, led by captains and lieutenants of 16 or so, pitch camp for two weeks on the Isle of Wight. They leave half their supplies behind on the boat, neglect to put the kettle on for tea; on the second morning, all that is left to feed the whole Brownie troop is eight slices of toast. In the brief pauses between muddled meals, the Guides manage to lose each other, usually during a hilarious drill called “stalking,” in which they are all over the heath like big-rumped, slightly spastic tiger kittens. Author Glyn is a connoisseur of chaos.

She is also a seer in matters of the 13-year-old heart—and a more vulnerable one than Fullie’s never fluttered. A dozen times a day she throws herself at the mercy of a savage sisterhood of judges —those” of her peers who have learned the power of group opinion and the perils of deviating from its cast-iron conventions. Whenever camp life becomes unbearable, she loses herself during a stalk and pretends that she is accompanied by a friendly unicorn, the traditional symbol of virginity. By the end of camp, she has found and kept a friend, but she still has need of her imaginary pal. “Just remember,” she says to a teacher who intrudes on her illusions, “I am a virgin, the right kind of virgin, and in the right ways. There aren’t so many like me nowadays.”

No indeed. And not many books like this, either.