Deerskin (Robin McKinley)

Genre: Fantasy
Year Published: 1993

Inspired by my success with Sunshine, I decided to pick up another of McKinley's books at my local library. I knew I was headed into completely different territory with Deerskin, but I thought I might as well give it a shot.

It was, indeed, very different territory. I still am not sure exactly what to make of Deerskin. On the one hand, the entire book was written in the highhanded, faux-old-fashioned, semicolon-heavy style of a modern author attempting to write something that feels like a fairy tale, and the broad arc of the story was telegraphed almost from page one, like a fairy tale would be. On the other hand, I was genuinely gripped by the narrative, once it progressed past the rape.

Yes, the rape: the entire book is centered around our heroine (Lissla) coming to terms (or, more rightly, failing to come to terms) with her rape by her father. The book is divided into three parts; the first is an introduction of sorts and then a long, long descent for Lissla until, at the end of the section, the rape occurs. The first part is permeated with dread and buckets of foreshadowing, which makes it awfully difficult to read.

The second part forms the meat of the book, but it doesn't begin promisingly: McKinley spends four full chapters with Lissla in a dissociative fugue, the existence of which forms the bulk of the narrative. Every other sentence is about her lack of memory, and it gets very old very quickly.

Finally, by the middle of the second part, the story becomes engaging and not impossible to bear -- not coincidentally, this is where Lissla's new life begins to shape itself. Things follow in a way that are fairy-tale-like, mostly, and even if it's a little thorny at points, it's very interesting and worth having struggled through the previous parts.

Where it all falls apart again, in my opinion, is the last chapter. I won't give away the plot by any means, but McKinley, in her more straightforward fantasy books (e.g. Spindle's End) is given to magically histrionic conclusions that are uniformly overlong and confusing. I had thought I'd escape that tendency this time, but no such luck. There's all sorts of nonsense about flame and blood and reflections and it 1) makes no sense and 2) is drastically different from the rest of the book (which relies only the faintest bit on magic).

I also want to mention, though I feel a bit petty doing it, that McKinley has a terrible habit of endowing her heroines with serious obsessions that seem to coincide with whatever she herself is obsessed at the time. Rose Daughter dedicates an enormous amount of narrative to tending roses; unsurprisingly, McKinley had just picked up the hobby herself. Deerskin, meanwhile, centers around sighthounds; McKinley's profile in the back concludes with, "She lives in Hampshire, England, with her husband, the writer Peter Dickinson, and three whippets." There is, of course, something to be said for writing what you know; however, there is also something to be said for pushing your own boundaries a bit.

Recommended? Meh. I think I would recommend it for a college-level class on "Rape in Literature" or something, but the average reader can give it a pass.