Reading: Tam Lin

[white_hart]

Diana Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock, which is a modern reworking of the Scottish ballad 'Tam Lin' as a suburban English adolescence, is one of my favourite books ever, so ever since someone mentioned Pamela Dean's Tam Lin, a reworking of the same ballad as the student experience at a Midwestern US liberal arts college, I've wanted to read it, and I finally got to the point where I wanted to read it enough that I actually ordered a copy a couple of months ago. (It isn't published in the UK, so there's no ebook version available, and I do tend to give more thought to purchases of paper books than ebooks.)

Dean's retelling covers three years and a couple of months of Janet Carter's life as a student at Blackstock College, pursuing a liberal arts degree with a major in English literature, building friendships, learning how to get along with a wide range of people and exploring romantic relationships, and at the same time investigating a book-throwing ghost and trying to work out why it is that everyone in the Classics department seems rather strange. Translating the plot of a ballad into a 450-page book leaves a lot of space around the plot for Dean to paint a picture of the college atmosphere, the pressures of studying and the delights and unreality of spending four years isolated from the world, surrounded by learning and other people who want to learn and share your interests. I found the liberal-arts college background familiar enough to make me rather nostalgic for my own student days, but different enough to be fascinating, and I liked the characters and their interactions a lot. I particularly enjoyed the way the friendship between Janet and her two roommates develops, from a very prickly relationship at the start (they have very little in common) to a real friendship and mutual support network, and the way that the college environment masks the very real peculiarities of some of the Classics students.

For me, this felt like the book I wanted Jo Walton's Among Others to be; a literate and literary study of growing up bookish, with a liminal fantastic element. Among Others simply didn't do it for me, but this did, and while I will never love it as much as Fire and Hemlock (which, interestingly, is also a very literary book - I read a lot of things for the first time because they were mentioned in it) I did like it a great deal.

Comments

[maia]

Diana Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock is one of my favorite books ever, too.

I read Pamela Dean's Tam Lin a few years ago and liked it a lot (though, like you, I didn't love it as much as Fire and Hemlock); I should re-read it!

[white_hart]

I suspect that Tam Lin is a book that will benefit from re-reading. Even knowing the ballad and therefore expecting the plot to pan out the way it did, the shape of the story is obscured until you have got to the end (though there were bits I worked out in advance, like looking up the Wikipedia article for 'When That I Was and a Little Tiny Boy' and realising who Robin and Nick were) and I'm sure a re-read would show all kinds of clues that are there for those who really know to look for them.

[tempestsarekind]

It's funny: I first tried to read Pamela Dean's book while I was still *in* college, and it didn't take at all: I found everyone in the novel horribly pretentious, and I don't think I made it to many of the supernatural events. Then I graduated from college and tried again, and somehow I loved it that time around. I'm still not entirely sure what this says about me.

Fire and Hemlock might only be my second-favorite "Tam Lin" novel, though: first place, I think, goes to Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard, which gave me the immortal phrase "meddling little pumpkinhead" and the utterly contrary, stubborn heroine Kate Sutton.

[white_hart]

I'm fairly sure I *was* that pretentious when I was at university, but I suspect I wouldn't have liked to admit it at the time!

The Perilous Gard sounds interesting, I will have to look out for a copy.

[ironed_orchid]

I love both these novels, and other re-read one and then follow with the other - although the order depends on what I was reading which prompted the initial desire to re-read.

[white_hart]

I am wondering about re-reading Fire and Hemlock now. Though they're definitely both more books for autumn than midsummer.

[sollers]

It sounds an interesting book, though I don't see what the plot has to do with Tam Lin.

In the ballad, a very corporeal and sexually predatory Tam Lin is held by a supernatural being. Janet meets him (on land that she owns), they have sex, she becomes pregnant and her brother tells her to get an abortion. When she tries to collect the herbs needed, an infuriated Tam Lin stops her. She learns that he is human; of equal social rank to herself; and at risk of being handed over to the devil unless she can save him, which she agrees to try to do - and succeeds.

[white_hart]

Well, that is also the plot of the book; the Classics department is, basically, the Fairy Court, with the head of department as Fairy Queen, and Thomas Lane is the student who Janet falls in love with and has to save from her clutches. However, there is a very low ratio of plot to atmosphere so there's much more to say about the atmosphere, and most of the plot is concentrated at the end of the book so it's quite hard to mention it without being spoilery.

[sollers]

Does she fall in love with him after non-consensual sex, and even so take the first steps towards an abortion? And in the ballad, she's more concerned with saving him from hell than from the Queen's clutches - that's what worries Tam Lin.

[white_hart]

The sex isn't non-consensual (though I'd never interpreted it as non-consensual in the ballad, either), but yes to the rest.

[sollers]

"At her he's asked no leave"? Definitely non-consensual. And the description of her when she reaches the hall suggests someone distressed to some extent, even before the offensive comment.