Manson family killers reimagined in Emma Cline’s The Girls

The depravity of Charles Manson and his murderous followers is the inspiration for an accomplished debut novel.

Manson Family members Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten arrive in court in 1971. Picture: UPI

The Girls,by Emma Cline (Chatto & Windus, 368pp, $32.99)

Millions of words have been written about the murders committed by Charles Manson’s “Family” of acid-crazed hippies in Los Angeles in the summer of 1969, but the line that perhaps comes closest to explaining why these particular atrocities should hold such a fascination belongs to Joan Didion. In her essay The White Album, she writes of the escalating tensions of that time: its air of menace, paranoia and fear.

When the news broke that actress Sharon Tate and several of her houseguests had been brutally slain, Didion recalls that misinformation and wild rumours immediately began to circulate — and yet, she observes, “I remember that no one was surprised.”

The chill running through that line is the recognition that, from the outset, the implications of the Manson murders seemed hard to contain. The story behind them certainly proved to be as multifaceted as it was bizarre. In the first instance, there was the sensational fact that much of the killing, though orchestrated by Manson, was carried out by a cohort of young women who were not only slavishly devoted to him but had been indoctrinated into a loopy belief system based on his interpretation of song lyrics by the Beatles. Then there was the creepy way in which Manson, a highly adept criminal sociopath, had insinuated himself into the Los Angeles music scene. He had hung out with Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys and schmoozed influential record producer Terry Melcher.

The chain of events that led to the murders involved some dodgy drug deals and the failure of Manson — a man conspicuously lacking any musical ability — to secure the recording contract he thought would make him famous.

It is easy to see why the Manson murders might be a tempting subject for an ambitious young writer. It is also not hard to see how the case’s notoriety and complexity, its many lurid and incredible details and its unsettling cultural reverberations might make it tricky to dramatise convincingly. And so it proves. Emma Cline’s The Girls is an unusually accomplished debut novel in many respects, but in presenting a fictionalised version of such horrific real events it distorts them in some curious ways.

The Girls.

The most striking aspect of The Girls is that it transforms the Manson murders into a story largely about the travails of adolescent female sexualisation. It describes the initiation of its young protagonist into the uncomfortable social dynamic that is generated by her burgeoning sense of longing and her experience of becoming an object of desire. More broadly, it proposes that young women are made insecure and submissive as a result of their desperate need to feel loved and accepted.

The Girls is narrated by Evie, who is 14 years old in 1969. She is from an affluent family, but her parents have recently separated. Unsupervised and lonely, she drifts into the orbit of a group of feral-looking girls she first sees wafting through the park one summer’s day, attracted by their irreverent and carefree manner. She becomes a regular visitor to the broken-down ranch where they live under the controlling influence of Russell, the novel’s sinister Manson figure. Without severing ties to her bourgeois existence, Evie is drawn into their world of sex and drugs, which promises a kind of liberation, but in fact replicates the patriarchal order of straight society.

The novel moves between Evie’s misadventures as a teenager and sections in which we encounter her as an older woman who is led to reflect on her experiences when she meets a bumptious young man named Julian and his meek girlfriend Sasha. The divided narrative underscores Cline’s frequently incisive view of the kinds of power imbalances that shape social interactions between men and women, though mismatched desires and expectations are not depicted as a strictly heterosexual problem. The person whose approval the young Evie comes most desperately to want is Suzanne, the most attractive and charismatic of the girls.

There is never any question where the novel is heading, though it presents a stripped-back version of historical events. In doing so, it elides many of the case’s weirdest details. The Girls does not trouble itself, for example, with the wigged-out nonsense that Manson preached to his drug-addled followers. Instead, Russell spouts platitudes about “building a new kind of society. Free from racism, free from exclusion, free from hierarchy.” This is ironic within the context of the novel, but represents a sanitising of the whole squalid episode, given that Manson’s ideas were frankly racist and the murders were supposed to incriminate the Black Panthers and spark an apocalyptic race war.

Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant when she was murdered.

Other complicating factors have been altered or excised. Wilson and Melcher are conflated into a single character, Mitch. The succinct and effective murder scene has the killers slaughtering a small child, but Cline effaces the appalling detail that Tate was eight months pregnant when Susan Atkins (on whom Suzanne is based) stabbed her to death. The narrative also omits the prior murder of Gary Hinman by Manson acolyte Bobby Beausoleil, and the fact that the night after the Tate killings several Family members went out again and butchered a middle-aged suburban couple named Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.

A novelist is under no obligation to stick to the facts, of course. The significance of these obvious alterations to the historical record is their reflection of Cline’s intentions. They indicate the extent to which she has been compelled to reshape events to give them a conventional narrative structure and a clear thematic focus.

In simplifying her narrative, however, Cline also simplifies the implications of the murders. The aspect of the novel that genuinely gave me pause was the symbolic meaning it attributes to the atrocity. Cline acknowledges the sensitivity of this issue. In the book’s early stages, she alludes to some of the distasteful mythologising that has come to surround the Manson killings. When Julian learns of Evie’s proximity to the famous case, he declares: “I always thought it was beautiful. Sick yet beautiful … A f..ked up expression, but an expression … An artistic impulse.” The novel counters this callow pronouncement, having the mature Evie reflect that the ongoing fascination with the case is motivated by an “essential ghoulishness”.

Yet the murder scene is styled in a way that confirms Julian’s characterisation. Adapting the ghastly detail that the historical murderers wrote on the walls in their victims’ blood, Cline has her fictional counterparts adorn the crime scene with a bloody heart, “like any lovesick teenager might doodle in a notebook”.

“They didn’t have far to fall,” Evie states near the end of the novel: “I knew just being a girl in the world handicapped your ability to believe yourself.” That may well be true. But it doesn’t exactly speak of a lack of self-belief to reinterpret such a deranged and nauseating crime as an expression of moony adolescent insecurity. The Girls is an impressive debut with some mundane flaws, notably an element of strained overdescriptiveness (it is the kind of novel in which a character can open a fridge door and be met with “fumes of cruciferous vegetables, roiling in plastic bags”), but for all its intelligence and perceptiveness there is, at its heart, something a little jejune.

James Ley is a writer and critic.