This is one of my very favourite books, and one that grows on me with every re-read. But I know from other online discussions that it isn’t a book for everyone.
Tam Lin is based on an old Scottish ballad. It’s the story of a group of friends at a liberal arts college in Minnesota in the 1970s, talking, reading, discussing, seeing plays, falling in love, meeting the Queen of Elfland, coping with ghosts, worrying about contraception and being sacrificed to Hell.
That makes it sound much more direct than it is. The story, the ballad story, the way the head of the Classics Department is the Queen of Elfland, is buried in indirection. Many readers wake up to the fact that one of the main characters is about to be sacrificed to Hell as an unpleasant shock sometime in the last couple of chapters. It isn’t just a book you like better when you re-read it, it’s a book that you haven’t had the complete experience of reading unless you’ve read it twice. Some readers have even argued that Dean wanted to write a college story and pasted on the magic to make it sellable—sellable outside Jon’s mainstream ghetto, no doubt. If you hate indirection and re-reading, you’re probably not going to like it.
In fact the magic, the ghosts, the ballad story and the Queen of Elfland are integral to the whole thing. The central thing the book is doing is college as magic garden. The whole experience of going to university is magical, in a sense, is a time away from other time, a time that influences people’s whole lives but is and isn’t part of the real world. College is where you are, as Janet puts it, paid to read for four years. It’s also many people’s first experience of being away from home and of finding congenial friends. But it isn’t, and can’t be, your real life. It’s finite and bounded. It falls between childhood and adulthood. And it’s full of such fascinating and erudite people who can quote Shakespeare. Where did they come from? They certainly can’t have come from high school, and “Under the hill” is Tam Lin‘s very interesting answer.
The other thing some readers object to is the pacing. The first year takes up far more of the book than the subsequent years, and the climax is over with almost before you’ve had time to savour it. I didn’t understand this properly myself until I wrote a play version of the ballad—the pacing of the novel is the pacing of the ballad. It’s very impressive, and I kicked myself for not spotting it until I tried to do it myself.
Furthermore, you won’t like Tam Lin unless you like reading, because a lot of it is about the meta-experience of reading and thinking and putting things together. (There are plenty of books you can enjoy even if you don’t like reading. This just isn’t one of them.)
You may not like it if you didn’t feel the need to go to, or hated, university—you may find yourself passionately envious though. I mean, I was a Classics major myself, but not only did I never meet any magic people (so unfair!) but I was at a British university where I did nothing but Classics for three years, never mind all those fascinating “breadth” requirements. (Incidentally, I’ve known a couple of parents who have given this book to their teenage kids who are bored with high school and can’t see the point of more education. This works.)
One of the main reasons I re-read certain books over and over is to hang out with the characters. The characters in Tam Lin are so cool to hang out with that I sometimes wish they were with me when I go to see plays. If you don’t get on with them, then it isn’t going to work for you. Myself, I think they’re wonderfully real and three dimensional and fascinating.
Oh, and the last reason you might hate it—if you hate books that mention other books so that you wind up with a reading list of things the characters read at the end. Now I adore this, and not just with books. I found Rodin because Jubal Harshaw liked him, and Bach because Cassandra Mortmain liked him, and the Beatles because George Orr and some aliens liked them. Similarly, Tam Lin encouraged me to read Christopher Fry and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Doctor Johnson. I hate it when books rely on knowledge of something external, when they lean on it as if everybody through all time knows who Cordelia is* and it’s enough to namedrop a reference to get automatic free atmosphere. In a book replete with references, Dean never does this. Even with Shakespeare she quotes enough and fills in enough that it doesn’t matter to understanding the story whether or not you knew it beforehand, without boring those who did know before.
It’s a fairly long book, but I’m always sorry when I get to the end and have to stop reading it.
Full disclosure: Pamela Dean is a friend of mine, I’ve beta read her latest book, and I’ve had her Tam Lin conducted tour of Carleton College. But if you think that makes any difference to what I think about the book, you should see all the friends I have whose books I keep meaning to get to sometime.
* Cordelia could mean Lear’s daughter, Miles Vorkosigan’s mother, or somebody in Buffy.
I’ve been meaning to re-read TAM LIN — it made me read and fall in love with THE LADY’S NOT FOR BURNING — but you also remind that it might make me sad for college! (One month and counting at a 9-5. Can has elves now?) The length and the span of years made it a great one to sink into for hours at a time, though. Thanks for putting this one back on my radar.
I’ve loved this book since the first time I read it (in the collegeless year that followed my first year of college, and the experience of reading it drove me back to school faster than I might have made it otherwise), but I think it helped that I was already familiar with the ballad. The ballad gave me a shortcut to a lot of the things that were going on in the book–for example, when the magic came, the surprise wasn’t that there was magic but that she had kept it out of the foreground for so long.
P.S. I do miss the Canty cover.
Hey, that new cover is #$&*+ and some. The Canty is piece of beauty.
Bloop, I think the new cover is OK (unlike the new cover of Fire and Hemlock, alas), just not up to the Canty one. You feel otherwise, I take it?
As someone who’s “never left college”–I teach and am in graduate school–I find myself very very interested in this book for the reasons you mention above. In fact, all your “warnings” don’t apply to me. I’ll keep an eye out for this.
Also, although I’ve yet to read it, this reminds me–only in the broadest ways–of Elizabeth Hand’s Waking the Moon.
There’s something about Dean’s writing that just isn’t for me. I had a very visceral dislike of Tam Lin when I read it my freshman year of college–it hit me in a very bad way for a multitude of reasons, all of which are entirely too tedious to spell out here. A decade later, I tried to read one of her other books and got only a little bit into it before completely losing interest.
Aedifica, Bloop: I quite like the new cover, and I’m thrilled it’s in print so I can in conscience recommend it to people. I also quite like the old cover. I don’t love either cover. It’s hard to think of what would be a perfect cover.
The first thing I thought of would be an arched bridge with people crossing it on horses, seen flat on, and the people and horses at the front would be college students in jeans on real horses and the people at the back would be out of Elfland and like a flat tapestry.
The second thing I thought of would be a book, falling, with the Canty cover on the book, and things (contraceptive pills, bagpipes, books, wreaths) and people falling out of the leaves as it fell.
Falling books are kind of a motif, from Janet’s mother dropping The Wind in the Willows to the ghost throwing books all the way through and Thomas dropping The Romance of the Rose in the library.
Thumbelinablues: Can has elves now?
My sympathies. I had a job like that once.
It also reminds me of one of my very favourite short-short stories. Andrew Plotkin posted it on rec.arts.sf.written in November 1998.
I said: Ever tried a pomegranate?
He replied: Yeah, and now I have to sit in this basement and write credit-card software for eight hours of every day.
I read this my first year of college. I liked it, but while in some ways it prepared me for the next few years, which in many ways were a magical garden, I couldn’t identify with the characters. We didn’t spend our time sitting around discussing Shakespeare. And they got to paint their dorm rooms. I was jealous of that. :-(
It’s funny how Diana Wynne Jones’ Fire & Hemlock shares many of the same characteristics (indirection, need for re-reads, Tam Lin, references to other books) with Dean’s Tam Lin, but I much prefer the former. I think Jones’ writing style just appeals to me more and Tam Lin feels so forced in parts. Anyway wish both books got new covers. :)) Good post.
Jo @@@@@ 9 — ::giggle:: The kicker is, even if there aren’t elves, there are spaceships at my job: I work for Tor.com. I’m just not a morning person. :-P
Also, re: cover, I like it, except that the green is a little intense and I wouldn’t have done the title in red. The title font is beautiful, though.
I read this book in high school and liked it a great deal (but it wasn’t the reason I went to Carleton, honest!).
The bits that hit me hardest during my first reading were all the bits about bridges, so it makes me happy that the bridge is on the cover of the new edition. Bridges really pop out in the story as neither-nor places: places that fulfill the conditions of magic because they are neither one thing nor the other, in the same way that college is neither home nor adult life.
Janet always seems to be thinking of something important just as she’s crossing over that bridge.
This book was first published when I was in high school, and my copy has since become as battered and abused as any of Janet’s favorites; I end up rereading it at least once a year. My only disappointment with it is that reading it in high school really screwed up my expectations for college…
Someday I’ll get around to reading everything else Pamela Dean has written; I’m really not sure what’s stopping me. It used to be because nothing else showed up in the local bookstore, but that’s hardly a decent excuse now.
I read this in 11th grade, if I recall rightly — maybe 12th, but I’m fairly sure it was 11th. I’d already found Stoppard, beginning with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead — which, as an aside, I did not understand at all when I first read it (an assignment in 10th grade drama), but then I saw the movie (a very faithful adapation; you can almost follow along in the script), and something clicked, and I fell in love with Stoppard. Anyway, I don’t recall who introduced it to whom, but Tam Lin ran through my HS social circle like wildfire. We read it, reread it, quoted it, discussed it, everything. I don’t know if I would’ve loved it quite so much if I’d come to it much earlier or much later — when I read Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary, I liked it, but I think I would’ve loved it if I’d read it at the right age.
Definitely one of the more formative books in my life.
My college experience was exactly like this. It was very useful that I’d read my first copy to rags by the time I got to college, because when I met the Classics department head, I recognized her right off, and when we were greeted by enthusiastic football players who wanted to unload my stuff for five bucks, I muttered, “I should have gone to Harvard!” and thoroughly confused my mother, since I never considered Harvard. In the 25ish years between Pamela’s and my Minnesota small private liberal arts college experiences, even the clothes were more or less the same — a little more flannel in mine, but that’s most of the difference.
One January when I’d read all the books I’d brought with me twice and all the books my friends had brought with them twice, I wrote down what Janet read in Tam Lin and went and got what the library had of that list. It was a good January.
This not only is one of my favorite novels of all time, but it had a real effect in my life. Similarly to some other commenters here, it gave me the desire to go back to college even as I was in the middle of a three-year interregnum. I ended up leaving the East Coast and going to a small liberal arts college in the Midwest. Go figure.
(By the way, the other book that made me want to go back to college was IF AT ALL POSSIBLE, INVOLVE A COW by Neil Steinberg. Both books feature cool, smart, fun people doing cool, smart and fun things.)
I love Tam Lin. I introduced myself to the commentariat at Making Light with a reference to Tam Lin.
When I first read it, I had been graduated from college–at a small, liberal arts school, with a major in Classics– for a few years, and it was all about everything I missed being a newly independent postgraduate. I had a Chase & Philips! Still do! But I also love it for my favorite quote of all time: “There’s no such thing as a fucking future subjunctive!”
This entry is a great look at exactly why those of us who love it do so, and also why those who don’t may not. Brava.
Aha, this is one of the books I read in High School
and plan to reread .. as soon as I remember their authors or titles.
I remember an end that made no sense, so I assume the underlying story went over my head. Still, it helped imbue me with a romantic view of what college would be like that was of course, later punctured.
Amazon has the old edition with the cover I’m nostalgic for. :-)
I know that this book has given me unrealistic expectations of college, and I’m not even in college yet.
Then again, a girl can dream, can’t she?
I was the only one at my college residence who could quote Shakespeare. Doing that resulted in getting my door kicked in by drunks at 2am, so I stopped it..
That’s the price of pragmatism, going to college to get a marketable degree instead of what I wanted to do. Now I take calls from the writers of credit card software, but at least I get to do it above ground.
I read this years after college, but my personal college experience was pretty magical (albeit sans faery) so this book resonated with me. It might have helped that I was on a Tam Lin bender at the time – I read every novelized version I could find – so I was watching for the ballad’s overtones in the storyline and wasn’t unduly surprised. It’s one of the select novels that I keep a (Canty covered) copy of on my shelves.
Reading Tam Lin if, like em, youa ctually failed miserably at uni is an interesting experience. I recognised the appeal of college as a magic garden but it’s mixed with this bittersweet feeling that it’s not for you.
I read this in high school, along with most of the other books in the Fairy Tale series. But it didn’t stick with me (the only one that did was Jane Yolen’s Briar Rose, though I came back to Jack the Giant-Killer later).
It was then overwritten in my mind by a completely different “Classics students in a small university do something dreadful and not entirely natural” book, The Secret History, by Donna Tartt. Despite the lack of Bacchanalia and murder in my study of Classics, that’s what I go back to to catch the taste of my days at university.
I’m not sure my brain has pigeonholes enough for both.
I read The Secret History from the library a year or so ago because people kept comparing it to Tam Lin. I have to say I was very disappointed with it.
It made me think that for any phenomenon, there are a large number of explanations. When you’re reading a story, you can’t help thinking about what the answers are. SF and fantasy’s answers just take place in a more interesting space than mainstream stories. The Secret History poses lots of interesting questions but it gives them trivial answers.
A little while ago I saw a man — balding, middle aged, little beard — wearing a skirt and pulling one of those shopping bags on wheels that old ladies use. He was barefoot. There are any number of possible explanations for this. Some of them are very obvious and boring, and some of them very interesting. In the case of the guy in the street, probably some mundane explanation holds. But in a story, and when considering things that don’t matter, like him, I prefer to keep my options as open as possible.
Tam Lin rewards that. The Secret History really doesn’t.
I think I enjoyed The Secret History because the alternate world that it touches on is native to the Classics, rather than alien to them.
Also, I can’t really agree with you here:
It may appear to, but I think you’ve missed something. It’s subtler, because Tartt wasn’t writing for a genre-accustomed audience. But causality in The Secret History works on two axes. On the one hand, it’s a perfectly plausible novel, with modern characters and normal cause and effect (a few weird things happen in people’s heads, but that’s not unusual).
On the other hand, many of the things that “just happen” from the modern perspective are inevitable from another point of view. Subtle events make huge differences for reasons that an ancient Greek would understand – the distinction in consequences between killing a stranger and killing a xenos, for instance. I find the final fates of the characters very Classical as well – the way that they each lose what they love best isn’t random, in that perspective, but the workings of the Furies.
It’s not as overtly layered as Tam Lin, but I found the subtlety suited me better. But hey, tastes vary.
The pacing of the book may be the same as the ballad, but it’s also, in my experience, the same as college, which is part of what made it so brilliant. Freshman year seemed to last forever, all full of newness and discovery. Senior year was over before I knew what was happening.
Oh, I love Tam Lin. You get down into it and don’t want to come back up, and then it ends and you wake, blinking, and are sad that there’s no more. I can’t find my copy; you remind me that I need to get a new one.
I don’t know that I’ve ever met anyone who has read Tam Lin and hated it (though I do know lots of people who haven’t read it at all, or even heard of it). I’ve had the experience many times, however, of saying to someone, frex, “That production of The Duchess of Malfi reminded me of this book, I don’t know if you know it, where someone does The Revenger’s Tragedy with these wigs …” at which point the someone will say “OMG! You’re talking about Tam Lin!! Isn’t that the most amazing book?!”
To be fair, however, I do hang out with a disporportionate number of people who (a) read (and sometimes write) fantasy, (b) are Associate Professors of English and/or Theatre, (c) own more books than you would think their flat could possibly accommodate, (d) read (and sometimes write) poetry, and/or (e) quote Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton, and/or Wycherly in casual conversation. So a shared affinity for Tam Linis perhaps not a huge surprise.
@aleistra: that’s so true! I hadn’t thought of it before, but that is almost exactly the way it felt. (My fourth year felt longer than my third, but only because I got very very sick halfway through and had to spend the summer finishing up term papers :P.)
’tis funny, I was just trying to think of this book the other day.
It, Greg Bear’s Songs of Earth & Power and Hans Bemmann’s The Stone and the Flute had a huge impact on me. I agree that it’s not for everyone, but I too found it at just the right time for me. Definitely putting it on the re-read list.
I think I first read this book my junior year of high school when I was looking forward to and curious about college.
I am enjoying re-reading it again now that I’m in college. I found it to be an accurate representation of both Carleton and the college I am currently attending.
This book is one of my favorites and I now own both a copy with the Canty cover and a copy with the newer cover.
I read this years after college but it was so different from my college experience that while it did make me want to go back to college, I wanted a new college to go to. I decided I wanted to go to St John’s, the one where you read all subjects. A great books program it’s called, I think. No idea if I’d be allowed when I already have a BA but oh I’d love that!
Url for St John’s is: http://www.sjca.edu/
I wish I could quote Shakespeare, too. I wish I had a youth as misspent as Janet has had. I read this book because I was interested in contemporary versions of fairy tales. I also read Wrede’s Snow White and Rose Red, Brust’s The Sun, Moon and the Stars, Yolen’s Briar Rose. Like Brust’s book, Tam Lin was pretty mundane, and the connection to the fairy tale a little too tentative, but I love it for other things. I reread it several times throughout high school and college. I wrote on my tattered copy, dog-eared pages, underlined passages. (I have a new copy since; the previous cover was better though.) I love the ending, where Janet writes a poem inspired by Thomas. And yes, I read R and G are Dead because of it, and I have a copy of Culpepper’s Complete Herbal. And I tried and failed to read The Worm Ourborouros. And my opinions of certain poets, such as Pope and Keats may have been forever skewed by Janet’s opinions.
On the other hand, the way it is written, you cannot untangle it from the texts mentioned therein, which might be a turn off to some readers, like a movie where the characters spout lines from other movies. But they’re lines that linger so beautifully in my impressionable mind.
“Fine, you say farewell to earth’s bliss, then.”
“And thou takest it not on thyself knave, I may well.”
“Oh had I know Tam Lin, what this night I did see, I’d have looked ye in the eye and turned ye to a tree.” :)
While I doubt she threw the Tam Lin stuff in to make it more marketable, I can see why people think so. The core of the book is the college-life stuff, the fairy tale element is little more than a subplot.
That might have worked at half the length. At 400 pages, it’s just a mass of endless tedious detail about Janet’s college life, and a level of literary references and intellectual talk that I didn’t think had any resemblance to real human beings (even allowing that characters in books usually talk better than the real thing.
@9 bluejo
I remember that “story”- I was the straight-man who asked about the pomegranate.
http://tinyurl.com/lf59xnd
I loved this book, even though I went to university and hated it in a traditional engineering department in Australia. So I can’t relate to much of the college stuff – it’s as fantastical to me as Faerie.
I recently found the 2016 Roses and Rot by Kat Howard, see Goodreads Review. It’s also based around the Tam Lin ballad/legends and education-related. If you loved Tam Lin, I think you’d enjoy Roses and Rot too.
I’m a sucker for stories set in schools. Intelligent people learning interesting things, that’s right up my alley. Tam Lin qualifies.
I am puzzled by one paragraph in the book:
When the lake was quiet again, the bagpipes were quite close, just the other side of the stream, and were playing a sang that Janet, who had helped Danny Chin run the lights for their high school’s production of Twelfth Night, recognized at once. Their school edition had not footnoted that song, she still remembered Danny’s astonished glee when she dragged out her father’s Shakespeare and showed him what the verse meant.
I tried to track down that footnote. I’ve examined more than one annotated Shakespeare. I never found a thing.
Where does that footnote live? What does it say? What is the subtext of that song? Does anybody have a clue?
Fernhunter, it’s probably this: https://books.google.com/books?id=hMQv1_PuyngC&pg=PA100&lpg=PA100&dq=Shakespeare+song+ribald&source=bl&ots=k-51eTyrNR&sig=ACfU3U0BBvLv7rnUpP1jaS6lkK-XdVll6Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi1vY_Z8a_qAhXqAZ0JHXH_AEgQ6AEwAXoECAQQAQ#v=onepage&q=Shakespeare%20song%20ribald&f=false
The rain that falls on the town is sperm (ah, Shakespeare). When I read Shakespeare in high school a kid brought a college edition in that had the dirty jokes in the footnotes and we passed it around like contraband.
@@@@@ 37, E:
Thanks. That makes sense. And certainly fits with Elizabethan notions of humor.
I’ve been wondering for years why I keep bouncing so hard off this book and you just solved the puzzle for me. But since you also mentioned Cassandra Mortmain and Bach (though not being repeatedly hit on the head with a teaspoon), I have to say I remember absolutely loving I Capture the Castle as a young adult, and it occurs to me Cassandra’s story is pretty much the polar opposite of Janet’s (no college, no real friend group, dysfunctional family, precarious finances, tragic love life, no Elfland royalty with tenure), so that’s maybe why.