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Jul. 13th, 2023 03:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretTam Lin by Pamela Dean
I know this book is a big favorite of some people on my reading list; Before reading it I pretty much knew about it entirely fromcahn's "Into the Life of Things", which is a great fic but is maybe not a great advertisement for what the book is actually doing? In particular, Sophia is such a fully realized character that I didn't realize how tenuously she exists in the original novel.
Instantly, with the first scene around Melinda Wolfe's office, I was pleasantly reminded of Emma Bull's The War for the Oaks, the way the world of the fey unexpectedly intrudes at an intersection with mundane architecture. Which is unsurprising when you realize that Bull and Dean were in a writing crit group together when the book was being written. But whereas The War for the Oaks becomes progressively more and more aggressively magical as the plot moves, other than those Melinda Wolfe scenes, and some of the Robin in the forest stuff, there isn't much that is visibly fantastical for most of Tam Lin, until the ending. Mostly it's a very finely written book about the intellectual and emotional lives of a small group of college students at a Minnesota liberal arts college in the 1970s. Which is sort of fascinating to me as a view of a parallel life? I've always said that the Magicians is my fantasy college experience, and I've also always said that there's a parallel universe where I'd decided that Cooper wasn't where I wanted to be, and transferred elsewhere and became an English major. So it's almost like, if my life had gone differently, instead of identifying with Brakebills I might've identified with Blackstock?
I liked some of the Shakespeare stuff, but eight pages of the experience of watching Hamlet may have been too much for me. Jo Walton's essay on the book (and by the way, Walton's confession that this is one of her favorite books comes as absolutely zero surprise to me, Tam Lin's influence is writ all over Walton's work) says that the weird pacing struck her as being in deliberate imitation of the folk ballad, but I still wonder if a more concise, and more conventionally plotted, version of the book could've told the same story more effectively.
As a novel about the magical potency of pregnancy, it definitely read differently to me for being in the quote unquote Post-Dobbs era. If there is little visible magic in the book, there is at least the magic of birth control pills, which Dean writes about almost as if they are an alchemist's potions, and the magic of at least the possibility of access to legal abortion, though I think maybe it's striking, given how long and expansive the book is in general, how little time Janet spends thinking about this option. Possibly Dean thinks that by this point in the novel we should understand intuitively where Janet is coming from, but it felt a little weird. Nonetheless, access to contraception is definitely written as a blessing of freedom and obligation that her characters do not take for granted, in a way that perhaps we are learning to not take for granted again.
Anyway, very good book, very strange book!
I know this book is a big favorite of some people on my reading list; Before reading it I pretty much knew about it entirely from
cahn's "Into the Life of Things", which is a great fic but is maybe not a great advertisement for what the book is actually doing? In particular, Sophia is such a fully realized character that I didn't realize how tenuously she exists in the original novel.Instantly, with the first scene around Melinda Wolfe's office, I was pleasantly reminded of Emma Bull's The War for the Oaks, the way the world of the fey unexpectedly intrudes at an intersection with mundane architecture. Which is unsurprising when you realize that Bull and Dean were in a writing crit group together when the book was being written. But whereas The War for the Oaks becomes progressively more and more aggressively magical as the plot moves, other than those Melinda Wolfe scenes, and some of the Robin in the forest stuff, there isn't much that is visibly fantastical for most of Tam Lin, until the ending. Mostly it's a very finely written book about the intellectual and emotional lives of a small group of college students at a Minnesota liberal arts college in the 1970s. Which is sort of fascinating to me as a view of a parallel life? I've always said that the Magicians is my fantasy college experience, and I've also always said that there's a parallel universe where I'd decided that Cooper wasn't where I wanted to be, and transferred elsewhere and became an English major. So it's almost like, if my life had gone differently, instead of identifying with Brakebills I might've identified with Blackstock?
I liked some of the Shakespeare stuff, but eight pages of the experience of watching Hamlet may have been too much for me. Jo Walton's essay on the book (and by the way, Walton's confession that this is one of her favorite books comes as absolutely zero surprise to me, Tam Lin's influence is writ all over Walton's work) says that the weird pacing struck her as being in deliberate imitation of the folk ballad, but I still wonder if a more concise, and more conventionally plotted, version of the book could've told the same story more effectively.
As a novel about the magical potency of pregnancy, it definitely read differently to me for being in the quote unquote Post-Dobbs era. If there is little visible magic in the book, there is at least the magic of birth control pills, which Dean writes about almost as if they are an alchemist's potions, and the magic of at least the possibility of access to legal abortion, though I think maybe it's striking, given how long and expansive the book is in general, how little time Janet spends thinking about this option. Possibly Dean thinks that by this point in the novel we should understand intuitively where Janet is coming from, but it felt a little weird. Nonetheless, access to contraception is definitely written as a blessing of freedom and obligation that her characters do not take for granted, in a way that perhaps we are learning to not take for granted again.
Anyway, very good book, very strange book!
(no subject)
Date: 2023-07-14 04:00 am (UTC)I will say that because of this book, I had the idea that college was a lot more like Tam Lin than my college experience actually was, even though I went to a liberal arts school. And one of my freshman year roommates was a Lit major and I did have friends who were humanities majors... but I guess I hung around tech geeks quite a bit more, and it turns out they don't do nearly so much quoting of Greek and English authors...
I adored the eight pages of watching Shakespeare -- though to be fair I read it before I had ever seen any Shakespeare on-stage, so it was, as above, more of a "here's what to expect" than a description at that point in my life.
The pacing is very weird. My own feeling is that it was supposed to replicate the pacing of college, where freshman year seems to take forever (in my memories freshman year takes up much, much more than 1/4 of my college memories), and then everything speeds up and up and suddenly senior year is here and you have to deal with the culmination of what you thought you knew years before, but didn't. Which jibes with her author's note, where Dean talks about realizing that Tam Lin the ballad is about being an adolescent.
Now, if you haven't already, you must read The Piper, which is amazing.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-07-14 04:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-07-15 09:14 pm (UTC)I wonder how much of one's college experience is pure luck, and how much of it is one's personality -- it would be pretty hard for me to imagine an AU in which I didn't want to hang out with the tech geeks rather than the Classics geeks :)
(no subject)
Date: 2023-07-17 01:16 pm (UTC)I wonder how much of one's college experience is pure luck, and how much of it is one's personality
Lol, Idk!
(no subject)
Date: 2023-07-14 04:17 pm (UTC)Once I finally made my peace with what it is ("a very finely written book about the intellectual and emotional lives of a small group of college students at a Minnesota liberal arts college in the 1970s" with a sprinkling of magic), I ended up loving it, but it's definitely one of those that I only recommend to a very few people, because I do think most people would find it more frustrating than anything else.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-07-15 12:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-07-16 08:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-07-17 01:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-07-14 05:10 pm (UTC)