[Hobbit]

This month's Book Club nominee is a novel by an author not known for his productivity but for his quality.

http://img1.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n3/n15552.jpg

Tamsin is a novel published in 1999. It won a Mythopoeic Award in 2000 for adult literature.

According to Wikipedia, Jenny Gluckstein moves with her mother to a 300-year-old farm in Dorset, England, to live with her new stepfather and stepbrothers, Julian and Tony. Initially lonely, Jenny befriends Tamsin Willoughby, the ghost of the original farm's owner's daughter.

Discuss!

[Erfael]

I meant to have this one finished by now, but I lost a bunch of reading time over the last few days due to...things. But I'm about 50 pages in so far and really liking the tone of this one. The narrator has a nice, unforced conversational honesty to her.

I'm so sad for Mr. Cat....I can't imagine putting any of my cats through that. Sounds like a horrifying experience for an animal.

[Randy M.]

I meant to have this one finished by now, but I lost a bunch of reading time over the last few days due to...things. But I'm about 50 pages in so far and really liking the tone of this one. The narrator has a nice, unforced conversational honesty to her.

I'm so sad for Mr. Cat....I can't imagine putting any of my cats through that. Sounds like a horrifying experience for an animal.

I'll be starting this today. I am looking forward to it.


Randy M.

[Erfael]

I tend to buy books like this from authors I like without reading blurbs or knowing what they're about. I seem them, I buy them, not much other thought needed. So in starting this on the day before Halloween, I had no idea it was a ghost story. Pleasant surprise there.

[Eventine]

I read about 20 pages before I read the blurb and saw it was a ghost story.
I think the opening of the novel was my favourite bit - the passive aggressive teen angst followed by the separation anxiety with Mr Cat and the alienation in moving somewhere old was well done.
By this stage I had firmly convinced myself it was a ghost story and then: the faery intrude. The appearance of the Boggart shifted my expectation a fair bit, and actually felt out of place for me. The reactions of the characters to this didn't ring true to me either, and it was only as we got to understand the true nature of the plight of the characters that I realised why faery was part of the plot.

One thing I have been wondering is what was special about Jenny that drew Tamsin to her? That she was foreign? Awkward? Of an age?

I'd like to call out a sentence I enjoyed, a lovely Beagle-esque piece of language:
Some of the Huntsmen were men, some women, some neither, some never.

It was also interesting to see that it was based on a treatment he originally wrote for Disney. It didn't feel at all Disney-esque when I was reading it, but looking back I can see how it would be done.

Overall, it didn't grab me as much as other Beagle books (I've read The Last Unicorn and A Fine & Private Place). I'm not sure if that's a function of the book or myself.

[Erfael]

I'm still only halfway through, and still quite enjoying it. Just met Tamsin, so I'll see what happens from here. To be honest, so far this one is pushing all the right buttons for me (in kind of a Mythago Wood way).

Knowing nothing about the book going into it, my experience has been kind of like: Oh, cool cat. I like cats, especially cool cats. Hey, we're moving to England...awesome. Old musty farmhouse in England? Even better. This seems like a ghost book...how appropriate for Halloween. Now they're in the car talking about all the little faerie critters. That reminds me, it's about time I read another book about faerie critters. I'll have to remember to ask the book club discussion about recs for good faerie critter books. Boggart?!? Maybe this IS a faerie critter book.

So far no real complaints.

I ran across a line I quite liked, too:

...it opened its mouth and this tiny, tiny, faraway meow came out. Not a real meow. More like an old yellowing memory of a meow.

[Eventine]

Yes, nice quote. I'm not much of a cat person myself, so probably didn't "get" some of the cat stuff as much as others.
I do wonder though:
Why the ghost cat?

[algernoninc]

why the ghost cat? why not?
I think the point of the faery creatures and the ghosts, made by Beagle in the last pages when Jenny thinks back to her adventures, is that they made for a more interesting world than the cold reality of Cambridge.

I've never had a cat, but if I had one I think it would behave like Mister Cat or like the one from The Door Into Summer by Heinlein :o

So .. I finished the book and I loved it. I'm quite old myself, but I could still remember what it was like to be 13, so I could relate to Jenny as the teenager with a bad attitude and independent spirit. If we're picking favorite quotes, here's something I picked:
“...because in a way it happened to someone else. I don't really speak that person's language anymore, and when I think about her, she embarrasses me sometimes, but I don't want to forget her, I don't want to pretend she never existed. So before I start forgetting, I have to get down exactly who she was, and exactly how she felt about everything. She was me a lot longer than I've been me so far.”

I think the book did a good job creating a sense of place - giving all those details about life in rural Dorset, the finicky weather, the dependance on the soil, the history imbued in the land, the rich heritage of folk tales and myths.
The ghost story may not be all that original, but I loved the presentation. Peter Beagle may not have a high output, but I have yet to read a book of his and not put it in my "to be revisited" shelf.

[Toma]

I haven't read it lately, but Tamsin is one of my favorite Beagle books, second only to The Last Unicorn. He crafts such a wonderful atmosphere, whether it be in New York or Dorset.

You don't have to believe in Hell. All you need is to hear someone who really does, who believes in it this minute, today, the way people believed in 1685—all you have to do is see his face, hear his voice when he says the word… and then you know that anyone who can imagine Hell has the power to make it real for other people.

[Erfael]

Well, I agree with Eventine. For me it lost a bit of steam once the ghost story got going full bore. All of the moving and settling in stuff was very engaging for me. The rest of it was fine, and still a cut above a lot of similar things, but I wished it had kept up to the level of the earlier bits. I think I'd have been completely happy with Jenny moving to England, learning of some faerie-types and growing up without any of the Tamsin stuff there at all.

Why a ghost cat? I think your answer is simple. Disney. If it was written for a Disney movie, some animal has to rub its nose affectionately up against another animal of the opposite sex somewhere along the way. There's no romance for the narrative character, so there simply must be one for her pet.