seahearth | Pamela Dean's Tam Lin

I don't know how I feel about this book. I spent about a week making dents in the first hundred pages and wondering why it wasn't gripping me, spent another week coming gradually into the middle two hundred's sway, and spent yesterday with the last hundred whooshing past me as I flopped between suitable reading spots. I think Dean's prose is not really my cup of tea, but her characters light it up very bright, once you love them.
Tam Lin is a retelling of the Scottish ballad "Tam Lin," which I am fond of. I met it maybe (hah) seven years ago in Dianna Wynn Jones' own retelling Fire and Hemlock, and have listened to it fairly often since then. It's an odd song; it exists in a hazy disturbing space between the story it describes, of its Janet's rape by its Tam Lin and her successful effort to win him from the Faerie Queen's company to be the father of her child, a story of compulsion upon compulsion and two people's desperate struggle to win some kind of future for themself; and the softer, gladder, story its language implies, where Janet falls in love with Tam and rescues him for his own sake as well as hers, and their life together opening out at the end can be imagined happy. Fire and Hemlock takes the second story, removing the rape and the pregnancy and having its Tam trick its Janet into a friendship that becomes truer than anything else in their lives. Tam Lin -- well, for most of Tam Lin's length the ballad is not actually very present. It's there in names and odd happenings, but not in any certain form. The book is set on a 1970s university campus, and its body is Janet's coming into and progress through her university life as an English major, with frequent asides about the poetry she's reading: it seems to be making a thing rather like Margaret Mahy's The Tricksters, where the magic is breathtaking and real and not the main point. But very late in the piece the "Tam Lin" story comes up into the fore and sweeps Janet into itself entire. I like that, in theory. It's a neat shape: here is her life -- this is what someone's life is, and then this is what happens when the Faeries get involved, and then this is the power a human life can have. But it takes the more positive love story while retaining the sex/pregnancy elements in a way that works really weirdly in its social context. To me it seems like it changes Janet's story so that its end has to lie long after the end of the original ballad, and then it stops at the end of the ballad anyway, with Tam's story over and Janet's not.
I am very happy I read this book; it has wonderful characters, and it conveys reading experience better than anything I've read but Jo Walton's Among Others -- but it could have been beautiful, and I'm still mad that I can't see it that way.