in which I ramble quite a lot about Damar and "Deerskin"
Just so you know, the following post contains spoilers for: a whole bunch of Robin McKinley's books, including but possibly not limited to: The Blue Sword, The Hero and the Crown, and Deerskin. It also contains spoilers for Charles Perrault's fairytale "Donkeyskin", on which Deerskin is based.
So, I read Deerskin recently. I'd been both saving it up (for when I was in a rare fiction-reading mood) and dreading it (because it deals with incestuous rape, which is just such a fun topic). As I started it, something about it seemed off. McKinley has retold fairy tales before (including two retellings of "Beauty and the Beast", Beauty and Rose Daughter), and at first I thought, well, it's just stylistically different from what I was expecting, that's all.
A few minutes later, I thought "I think she got some Scandinavian fairytales into this French fairytale. Maybe that's why it is weird."
Much later on -- a few days later -- I thought "This feels oddly like it's a Damar book. But it's not using any Damar vocabulary, so it must not be." Not 5 minutes after I thought this, Lissar/Deerskin (the protagonist) drinks malak, a characteristically Damarian drink. We-ell...but it's still not using any of the rest of it...but now I'm really looking for those elements in the story, and it's distracting me a bit.
Then another character, Prince Ossin, mentions Aerin and Maur, which sets the story firmly in a world containing Damar, if not inside Damar itself. (Aerin is the protagonist of The Hero and the Crown, the daughter of the king of Damar. Her battle with Maur is one of the central events of The Hero and the Crown.)
But are we in Damar, or just near Damar -- and which Damar, anyway? Ossin says that Aerin and Maur's battle was "very far away", and certainly a lot of Damarian vocabulary (notably "sol" and "sola" for "lady" and "lord") is missing. Certainly, there is no mention of the ever-present Damarian enemy, the North. Certainly, if Aerin was long ago, and this is Damar, there ought to be desert, and there is not; that climate change comes about at the end of The Hero and the Crown.
Just as certainly, these people drink malak, have dogs similar to the dogs brought to Damar by Aerin, and know the legend of Aerin Dragon-Killer.
I believe (from the lack of railroads and lack of mentions of a conquerer from overseas) that Deerskin is set between The Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword. Are the kingdoms of Deerskin (which are often very small) the small kingdoms that Damar dissolved into after the Golden Age (which began with Aerin's rule)?
Lissar's father is the king of the richest kingdom about, but he is clearly not king of what I'd think of as Damar: the vocabulary is missing, the hunting-cats are missing, the desert is missing, the Riders are missing.
And...it's jarring. It doesn't quite work for me. Damar is not a European-nation-analogue of any sort, and yet the world Lissar inhabits clearly is. Perhaps there are more European-like parts of Damar that McKinley just never showed us before; perhaps in the geography of that world, there is a part of it where Damarian and European-analogue influences are mixed. (I'm deliberately not saying "Home", the term for the particular European-analogue conquerer in The Blue Sword. "Home" is an England-analogue, and I don't know what other analogues exist in McKinley's mental map of this universe.)
I'd rather it had been left out, in the final analysis, because it makes me stop dead in my reading and try to work out where Lissar and her experiences fit into Aerin's world, and into Harry's (Harry is the protagonist of The Blue Sword, a young woman who is abducted by Corlath, king of Damar). And there just aren't enough similarities to make it worthwhile; the story doesn't gain additional emotional resonance from the connection. I think that the emotional resonance -- and the ease of fitting the tales together -- is very important in this kind of thing.
No matter which order you read The Blue Sword (1983) or The Hero and the Crown (1985) in, you can use them to reflect on each other, to change or deepen the resonance of certain events. In The Blue Sword, Harry has several visions of Aerin, and the wizard Luthe wears a red jewel around his neck. There are details in the visions that seem throwaway, but in the light of The Hero and the Crown, have deep meaning: that white horse Aerin is riding in the vision was the first horse to be ridden as the Damarians now ride. That necklace of Luthe's contains the bloodstone of the dragon Maur, which Aerin slew.
And, of course, the reverse is true: Aerin has a vision in which she sees Harry; Aerin is joined on her quest by wild cats and dogs that readers of The Blue Sword will recognize as the ancestors of the hunting dogs and cats of Corlath and Harry's day.
But there's nothing in Deerskin to reflect. If you don't know Damar, the presence of malak is just an unexplained fantasy drink, and Aerin and Maur just part of this fantasy-world's mythology. If you do know Damar, it's distracting to have it kept at such a distance, and to have it fit so uneasily in with the world McKinley's built in Deerskin.
I don't want to give the impression that I disliked the book, because I didn't; aside from the occasional POV bobble (something McKinley is prone to, and which sometimes drives me to distraction in her early work -- The Blue Sword is particularly bad in this respect), the writing was strong, lyrical and beautiful.
There are a fair few versions of the Perrault fairytale floating around out there, but most of them have been heavily sanitized. McKinley is not about sanitizing. I like that she did not shy away from the horror of some of the subject matter, but instead showed that she has a fine hand at dealing with such things.
Some of the imagery was amazing -- some of it gruesome, some of it gorgeous. The rape scene is horrific and vivid without being explicit; Lissar waking curled in the hollow of grass is evocative and tender. Lissar/Deerskin herself is interesting -- she was badly damaged by her parents' neglect even before her father raped her and left her for dead -- but she's not weak, and she fights her own damn battles. (She tends to attribute a lot of her strength to her dog Ash and to the goddess Moonwoman, but I think she's just not very good at seeing how much of what they gave her came out of her own gifts.)
I've also got a soft spot in my heart for the entire royal family of the kingdom where Lissar finds sanctuary. The king of that land had decided Lissar's beautiful mother wasn't worth performing the ridiculous tasks necessary to gain her hand, and married his kindly, stout, practical cousin instead. I think she makes a fine queen, and a fine mother: she is sweet to Deerskin, knows how to do useful things, is clearly concerned with the happiness of her children, and Ossin mentions that she liked to point out unequal gender roles in fairytales to him. Heh.
The young princess, Camilla, doesn't have much personality; she's burdened, I think, by being thought pretty by everyone around her -- and truly, she is mostly there so that Ossin can complain about her unsuitable suitor, and so that Lissar can rescue her. (I am generally anti-the-princess-needs-rescuing, but I am pro-the-princess-as-rescuer, so all in all, I'm fine with this one.)
Ossin himself is chubby, dog-obsessed, and kind. (I rather think he's his mother's son.) He loves Lissar not because she is a princess, or because she is beautiful, but because of herself: her strength and willpower and all the damaged bits, too. (And her love of dogs.)
One thing I don't really understand is why McKinley left in so much culpability for Lissar's dead mother; there's a clear implication in the novel that the queen haunts her own portrait, that she somehow mystically drove the painter to paint it as he did, and when Lissar returns her pain to her father, it is in the shape of her mother, wreathed in flame. The mother often gets a lot of blame in versions of "Donkeyskin", and I just don't see why it's necessary to put that in here. It makes it quite easy to read Deerskin as if the king has been driven insane by the evil haunted portrait of the queen, so he's not really responsible for raping his daughter....except that McKinley says that he is responsible, and punishes him for what he has done.
In most versions of "Donkeyskin", in addition to the dead mother being blamed for her unreasonable deathbed request, the father gets off light -- never punished, and usually just viewed as a victim of grief. (In most versions, he's been sanitized to her "adopted" father, and the rape never happens; he just wants to marry her. Even so.) McKinley clearly didn't think that was just peachy keen, so he gets his comeuppance at what is supposed to be his wedding to Camilla, Ossin's younger sister.
When, early in the book, he announces his intention to marry his own daughter, the members of his own court blame his desire on Lissar herself. Even when she is begging him not to make her marry him, and the people around are thinking how evil she must be, to have bewitched the king this way, to make him desire her. (I rather suspect that the king, and perhaps Lissar's mother as well, had a magical talent that made them seem so wonderful and gave them a hold over the minds of others.)
Lissar should be ashamed? Not by the end of the book, she's not. It's not her who should be ashamed, and she makes damn sure everyone knows it.
This version of the story remains the only one I've read where the father is outright punished for his crime: exposed before everyone, emotionally destroyed, and magically turned into an old man.
Well, that was a lot longer than I thought it would be.
So, I read Deerskin recently. I'd been both saving it up (for when I was in a rare fiction-reading mood) and dreading it (because it deals with incestuous rape, which is just such a fun topic). As I started it, something about it seemed off. McKinley has retold fairy tales before (including two retellings of "Beauty and the Beast", Beauty and Rose Daughter), and at first I thought, well, it's just stylistically different from what I was expecting, that's all.
A few minutes later, I thought "I think she got some Scandinavian fairytales into this French fairytale. Maybe that's why it is weird."
Much later on -- a few days later -- I thought "This feels oddly like it's a Damar book. But it's not using any Damar vocabulary, so it must not be." Not 5 minutes after I thought this, Lissar/Deerskin (the protagonist) drinks malak, a characteristically Damarian drink. We-ell...but it's still not using any of the rest of it...but now I'm really looking for those elements in the story, and it's distracting me a bit.
Then another character, Prince Ossin, mentions Aerin and Maur, which sets the story firmly in a world containing Damar, if not inside Damar itself. (Aerin is the protagonist of The Hero and the Crown, the daughter of the king of Damar. Her battle with Maur is one of the central events of The Hero and the Crown.)
But are we in Damar, or just near Damar -- and which Damar, anyway? Ossin says that Aerin and Maur's battle was "very far away", and certainly a lot of Damarian vocabulary (notably "sol" and "sola" for "lady" and "lord") is missing. Certainly, there is no mention of the ever-present Damarian enemy, the North. Certainly, if Aerin was long ago, and this is Damar, there ought to be desert, and there is not; that climate change comes about at the end of The Hero and the Crown.
Just as certainly, these people drink malak, have dogs similar to the dogs brought to Damar by Aerin, and know the legend of Aerin Dragon-Killer.
I believe (from the lack of railroads and lack of mentions of a conquerer from overseas) that Deerskin is set between The Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword. Are the kingdoms of Deerskin (which are often very small) the small kingdoms that Damar dissolved into after the Golden Age (which began with Aerin's rule)?
Lissar's father is the king of the richest kingdom about, but he is clearly not king of what I'd think of as Damar: the vocabulary is missing, the hunting-cats are missing, the desert is missing, the Riders are missing.
And...it's jarring. It doesn't quite work for me. Damar is not a European-nation-analogue of any sort, and yet the world Lissar inhabits clearly is. Perhaps there are more European-like parts of Damar that McKinley just never showed us before; perhaps in the geography of that world, there is a part of it where Damarian and European-analogue influences are mixed. (I'm deliberately not saying "Home", the term for the particular European-analogue conquerer in The Blue Sword. "Home" is an England-analogue, and I don't know what other analogues exist in McKinley's mental map of this universe.)
I'd rather it had been left out, in the final analysis, because it makes me stop dead in my reading and try to work out where Lissar and her experiences fit into Aerin's world, and into Harry's (Harry is the protagonist of The Blue Sword, a young woman who is abducted by Corlath, king of Damar). And there just aren't enough similarities to make it worthwhile; the story doesn't gain additional emotional resonance from the connection. I think that the emotional resonance -- and the ease of fitting the tales together -- is very important in this kind of thing.
No matter which order you read The Blue Sword (1983) or The Hero and the Crown (1985) in, you can use them to reflect on each other, to change or deepen the resonance of certain events. In The Blue Sword, Harry has several visions of Aerin, and the wizard Luthe wears a red jewel around his neck. There are details in the visions that seem throwaway, but in the light of The Hero and the Crown, have deep meaning: that white horse Aerin is riding in the vision was the first horse to be ridden as the Damarians now ride. That necklace of Luthe's contains the bloodstone of the dragon Maur, which Aerin slew.
And, of course, the reverse is true: Aerin has a vision in which she sees Harry; Aerin is joined on her quest by wild cats and dogs that readers of The Blue Sword will recognize as the ancestors of the hunting dogs and cats of Corlath and Harry's day.
But there's nothing in Deerskin to reflect. If you don't know Damar, the presence of malak is just an unexplained fantasy drink, and Aerin and Maur just part of this fantasy-world's mythology. If you do know Damar, it's distracting to have it kept at such a distance, and to have it fit so uneasily in with the world McKinley's built in Deerskin.
I don't want to give the impression that I disliked the book, because I didn't; aside from the occasional POV bobble (something McKinley is prone to, and which sometimes drives me to distraction in her early work -- The Blue Sword is particularly bad in this respect), the writing was strong, lyrical and beautiful.
There are a fair few versions of the Perrault fairytale floating around out there, but most of them have been heavily sanitized. McKinley is not about sanitizing. I like that she did not shy away from the horror of some of the subject matter, but instead showed that she has a fine hand at dealing with such things.
Some of the imagery was amazing -- some of it gruesome, some of it gorgeous. The rape scene is horrific and vivid without being explicit; Lissar waking curled in the hollow of grass is evocative and tender. Lissar/Deerskin herself is interesting -- she was badly damaged by her parents' neglect even before her father raped her and left her for dead -- but she's not weak, and she fights her own damn battles. (She tends to attribute a lot of her strength to her dog Ash and to the goddess Moonwoman, but I think she's just not very good at seeing how much of what they gave her came out of her own gifts.)
I've also got a soft spot in my heart for the entire royal family of the kingdom where Lissar finds sanctuary. The king of that land had decided Lissar's beautiful mother wasn't worth performing the ridiculous tasks necessary to gain her hand, and married his kindly, stout, practical cousin instead. I think she makes a fine queen, and a fine mother: she is sweet to Deerskin, knows how to do useful things, is clearly concerned with the happiness of her children, and Ossin mentions that she liked to point out unequal gender roles in fairytales to him. Heh.
The young princess, Camilla, doesn't have much personality; she's burdened, I think, by being thought pretty by everyone around her -- and truly, she is mostly there so that Ossin can complain about her unsuitable suitor, and so that Lissar can rescue her. (I am generally anti-the-princess-needs-rescuing, but I am pro-the-princess-as-rescuer, so all in all, I'm fine with this one.)
Ossin himself is chubby, dog-obsessed, and kind. (I rather think he's his mother's son.) He loves Lissar not because she is a princess, or because she is beautiful, but because of herself: her strength and willpower and all the damaged bits, too. (And her love of dogs.)
One thing I don't really understand is why McKinley left in so much culpability for Lissar's dead mother; there's a clear implication in the novel that the queen haunts her own portrait, that she somehow mystically drove the painter to paint it as he did, and when Lissar returns her pain to her father, it is in the shape of her mother, wreathed in flame. The mother often gets a lot of blame in versions of "Donkeyskin", and I just don't see why it's necessary to put that in here. It makes it quite easy to read Deerskin as if the king has been driven insane by the evil haunted portrait of the queen, so he's not really responsible for raping his daughter....except that McKinley says that he is responsible, and punishes him for what he has done.
In most versions of "Donkeyskin", in addition to the dead mother being blamed for her unreasonable deathbed request, the father gets off light -- never punished, and usually just viewed as a victim of grief. (In most versions, he's been sanitized to her "adopted" father, and the rape never happens; he just wants to marry her. Even so.) McKinley clearly didn't think that was just peachy keen, so he gets his comeuppance at what is supposed to be his wedding to Camilla, Ossin's younger sister.
When, early in the book, he announces his intention to marry his own daughter, the members of his own court blame his desire on Lissar herself. Even when she is begging him not to make her marry him, and the people around are thinking how evil she must be, to have bewitched the king this way, to make him desire her. (I rather suspect that the king, and perhaps Lissar's mother as well, had a magical talent that made them seem so wonderful and gave them a hold over the minds of others.)
Lissar should be ashamed? Not by the end of the book, she's not. It's not her who should be ashamed, and she makes damn sure everyone knows it.
This version of the story remains the only one I've read where the father is outright punished for his crime: exposed before everyone, emotionally destroyed, and magically turned into an old man.
Well, that was a lot longer than I thought it would be.