Just for fun, a book review: Deerskin, by Robin McKinley

Astounded at how long it's been since I've created a new entry here, I'm figuring it's time to drop something in quick. So here goes.

One of my aims for this space has been to simply use it to get into the habit of writing. So, when no earth-shaking topic presents itself, or when (as today) I just don't feel quite ready to try and shake the earth, I may slip in something a little more comfortable, such as a book, music, or film review. But, be forewarned... I have little interest in being up-to-date or pursuing the popular, and am more likely to spend my words in praise of an old favorite - especially if I feel it's underappreciated - than in chase of the Latest New Thing.

So, in that spirit:

Several of my favorite novels have come from the prolific pen of Robin McKinley, and as I write this, I am in the middle of my eleven thousand, four hundred and fifty-first re-reading of Deerskin. Okay, okay, so that might be just a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the idea. It’s a well-worn treasure on my bookshelf – and this despite the fact that when I first closed the book upon its final page, I was certain that I would never, ever be able to open it again, so wrenching had been the trip. Luckily, I was wrong about that last bit. It’s not a comfortable story to enter, but it is a deeply magical one, and well worth the trouble if you appreciate a more serious fantasy now and then.

Deerskin is a reformulation of an old folktale that isn’t often told these days, for its plot is woven of the kind of stuff that we no longer wish to mention (hush!) in front of the children, and we have long labored under the delusion that fairy tales are purely children’s fare. The original version – titled “All-Fur” in some popular Grimm’s translations – has a simple but disturbing plot: the lovely princess, who happens to be the spitting image of her dead mother, must outwit her would-be incestuous father. When time and inventiveness fail, she simply packs up her valuables, neatly escapes king and courtiers, and heads off into the sunset, where she finds, captivates, and marries her own true prince and lives Happily Ever After. The End.

McKinley’s version is far less simple, and much more finely drawn. Deerskin’s heroine is the princess Lissla Lissar, a long-neglected royal daughter obscured by her mother’s memory, frightened by her father’s madness, and caught in the web of courtly pretense which surrounds them all. In the dark narrowness of her sheltered experience, Lissar can find no better defense than an instinctive, desperate retreat, which cannot shield her in the end from the king’s forced attentions – and I do mean forced. Battered and broken, she flees out into the world, forgetting her past, surviving by luck and stubbornness. The only treasure that goes with her is Ash, a fiercely loyal hunting-hound, heart’s companion of her lost childhood.

What follows is an inspired intertwining of magic and realism which is one of the hallmarks of McKinley’s fiction. Survival is hard, the world is harsh, and when help and guidance finally arrive in the form of the mysterious bright-dark Lady, the favors she bestows are complex and not without price. Along the way Lissar herself becomes a mythic, almost archetypal figure to those she encounters – a cool, remote, self-contained personage lurking at the borders of human society, radiant with a power born partly of her own strength of will and partly of the Lady’s peculiar and unpredictable gifts.

Much of this the reader sees through Lissar’s eyes, through a mind and memory oddly fragmented and guarded. We know what is in it, but she does not, and the stumbling introspection of the heroine will almost certainly be a turn-off for those readers who are not themselves inclined to much introspection. For despite violence, terror, love, loss, magical interventions and large deadly creatures, this is neither a romance nor an adventure novel; the real action takes place on a largely interior stage, a battle of self with self for the prize of either healing or oblivion, with a knife’s-edge balance between the two. This is as intimate a connection as can be achieved without a first-person narrator (and in most cases, even with one), as it is the space inside Lissar’s head which the reader must inhabit in order to fully experience McKinley’s carefully deconstructed fairy tale.

Then, too, McKinley is in no hurry to advance her plot and get to the end; rather, she enriches the reader’s slow journey with small, sometimes random details that show the characters and their setting in four dimensions – a world made solid by implication rather than explication. Readers must be willing to linger, to sit and rock and listen to the tale unfold in its own time, inhabiting the moment. The painting of the queen’s portrait is nearly a short story in itself, spiraling down into a veiled madness which is felt but never spoken. At the tale’s other end, the royal kennels feel so familiar and comfortable that one hardly notices what a significant portion of the plot and character development takes place almost entirely in a single small wooden pen, littered with straw and a scattering of puppies.

It is the heroine’s relationship with her sleek fleethound, Ash, that gives the book much of its early warmth, for Lissar’s world is at first a cold and distant one. In this book as in others, McKinley has a knack for writing human-animal interactions that feel close and meaningful without resorting to crude-but-convenient anthropomorphisms. And it is important that this set of interactions be a richly woven, solid, and believable one, for it is mainly through Ash that Lissar encounters and interprets her world. It is Ash who provides that much-needed point of contact with a wider, more promising circle of human society – and, most importantly, with Ossin, the less-than-handsome prince who does, belatedly, appear on the scene. Ossin himself is one of the most charmingly human characters ever encountered in any fantasy kingdom, and the slow, shy, tentative and (as events prove) precarious friendship between these two is developed with quiet but persistent attention. One might even call it affection, as there is a distinct sense that the writer likes these characters – that they are friends of hers, rather than objects to cleverly manipulate for literature’s sake.

There is a clear but subtle element of metanarrative in Deerskin, a sort of gently sly commentary on the ways in which human lives and the stories they generate are inextricably intertwined. The fairy-tale perfection of of Lissar’s royal parents holds their entire kingdom in thrall, despite the colder reality behind it; the sadder tale of the Moonwoman and her coursing hounds gradually takes on a fruitful and transformative life of its own as Lissar strruggles to find her place in the world. And, although McKinley’s story is light-years distant from its folktale ancestor, the astute reader will smile to catch those not-quite-hidden references to objects and elements from the older tale, often intentionally misplaced to another corner of the plot to suggest a different meaning. McKinley is actually rather brilliant at this, here as in other books (try Spindle’s End in particular), and it may take many readings to catch any given reference (which then instantly becomes blindingly obvious and significant, making you wonder how you could possibly have missed it the first seven or twelve times through – but that’s simply because you were so busy reading the story for its own sake that you forgot there ever was another version). In my favorite nod to “All-Fur,” the three magnificent dresses of the original narrative are rejected one by one, for the easy solutions of the Grimms’ unnamed and still-innocent princess are simply not available to this more real and complicated heroine, scarred by experience. The moon-colored gown she chooses instead is suggestive of the ambiguous, ambivalent lunar imagery – never fully dark or fully light – which haunts so much of Lissar's story.

In the end, Deerskin – like so many of McKinley’s tales – is essentially about how we humans navigate for ourselves the ever-fluid lines between reality and fantasy, both in our minds and in our outward lives. Fear, hope, and potential, the author constantly but quietly reminds us, are intimately bound to the stories in which we find ourselves, and the stories we claim as our own. And this one, indeed, is a story worth living and reliving: harshly beautiful, ripe with familiar meanings and questions newly framed by a master hand.