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Book Review: Tam Lin
Feb. 3rd, 2014 08:11 amPamela Dean’s Tam Lin is not quite like anything else I’ve ever read, and given how many books I’ve read, that’s saying something. It takes place in college, which is a somewhat unusual setting. It’s a fantasy book, but nothing indisputably fantastical happens until the last chapter. The heroine doesn’t end up with the guy she spends most of the book dating. There’s not much by the way of a plot.
This is not to say that it’s aimless or dull. It is, rather, meandering; the aim is not to get anywhere in particular, but to explore Janet’s intellectual growth and the world of Blackstock College. Janet is brilliant, persnickety, quite funny and quite sure of her own literary opinions. Certain enough, in fact, that she often merely hints at them rather than explaining them outright: people with proper literary opinions will simply understand what she means. She feels like someone I might actually meet, and might not like, exactly, but would like to listen to: she always has something interesting to say, as all the best narrators should.
I particularly liked Janet’s relationship with Tina, one of her two roommates. Almost instantly upon meeting Tina, Janet takes against her. Even Janet realizes there’s nothing really wrong with Tina (unless you count not reading very much, which Janet in her snippier moments does), but although they eventually become friends of a sort, Janet remains always within a hairsbreadth of finding Tina annoying. It’s a subtly drawn and unusual relationship - or at least, unusual for literature; I suspect many people can think of an acquaintance who they find inexplicably annoying for no good reason.
However, Blackstock itself is my favorite thing about the book. Blackstock is at once quite different and uncannily similar to my own alma mater, which is also a liberal arts college in the Midwest. Technology has changed a lot of details, but the campus atmosphere is eerily similar. Although my college didn’t host a secret court of a fairy queen…
Then again, how would I know? Almost no one at Blackstock does. Janet doesn’t, until those last chapters when at last the fairy world subtly intrudes on the human. This makes it one of the most effective portrayals I’ve ever seen of a secret magical underworld: it seems small and strange and uncanny enough that it really could remain secret, simply because it wants very little of the human world.
This is not to say that it’s aimless or dull. It is, rather, meandering; the aim is not to get anywhere in particular, but to explore Janet’s intellectual growth and the world of Blackstock College. Janet is brilliant, persnickety, quite funny and quite sure of her own literary opinions. Certain enough, in fact, that she often merely hints at them rather than explaining them outright: people with proper literary opinions will simply understand what she means. She feels like someone I might actually meet, and might not like, exactly, but would like to listen to: she always has something interesting to say, as all the best narrators should.
I particularly liked Janet’s relationship with Tina, one of her two roommates. Almost instantly upon meeting Tina, Janet takes against her. Even Janet realizes there’s nothing really wrong with Tina (unless you count not reading very much, which Janet in her snippier moments does), but although they eventually become friends of a sort, Janet remains always within a hairsbreadth of finding Tina annoying. It’s a subtly drawn and unusual relationship - or at least, unusual for literature; I suspect many people can think of an acquaintance who they find inexplicably annoying for no good reason.
However, Blackstock itself is my favorite thing about the book. Blackstock is at once quite different and uncannily similar to my own alma mater, which is also a liberal arts college in the Midwest. Technology has changed a lot of details, but the campus atmosphere is eerily similar. Although my college didn’t host a secret court of a fairy queen…
Then again, how would I know? Almost no one at Blackstock does. Janet doesn’t, until those last chapters when at last the fairy world subtly intrudes on the human. This makes it one of the most effective portrayals I’ve ever seen of a secret magical underworld: it seems small and strange and uncanny enough that it really could remain secret, simply because it wants very little of the human world.
