panguitch's Full Review: Peter S. Beagle - Last Unicorn
It does seem odd to call a 35 year old novel a classic. But while fantasy itself is perhaps the oldest genre, it’s hard to place a birth date for contemporary fantasy before 1937, when Tolkien published The Hobbit. What would become the contemporary genre germinated slowly, with Lewis publishing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in 1950 and Tolkien The Lord of the Rings in 1954. The rate at which major new works were published accelerated, but didn’t become exponential until 1977, that landmark year when Brooks and Donaldson finally harnessed the pent-up "I want to read something else like this!" demands of second-generation Tolkien fans.
So when Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn came out in 1968 there were still no aisles devoted to fantasy in bookstores and libraries. But in a way, less meant more. More freedom from expectations, at least. It hadn’t yet gotten to the point where you were required to populate your world with elves, dwarves and hobbit look-alikes. Or write trilogies. Or, as is the current trend, to stretch your story over ten thousand pages. In 1968 you were free to make your own rules. Or at least borrow from someone besides Tolkien.
And don’t let the wizards, castles, outlaws, heroes, or even the harpy or the unicorn fool you. Beagle is borrowing from nothing so much as his own era. An ecstatic individualism suffuses The Last Unicorn. Not so much in its simple tale of a unicorn searching for others of her kind, but in the style of each and every phrase. This exuberance thickens the story like starch and is best exemplified by the butterfly who dances on the unicorn’s horn while spouting the nonsense it’s picked up here and there:
"Do you know what I am, butterfly?" the unicorn asked hopefully, and he replied, "Excellent well, you’re a fishmonger. You’re my everything, you are my sunshine, you are old and gray and full of sleep, you’re my pickle-face, consumptive Mary Jane." He paused, fluttering his wings against the wind, and added conversationally, "Your name is a golden bell hung in my heart. I would break my body to pieces to call you once by your name."
Story
This is a simple tale. A unicorn wonders whether she is the last of her kind and goes searching for others. She is joined by a failed wizard and a woman who’s been cooking for an outlaw band. They come to King Haggard’s castle seeking the Red Bull, said to have driven the other unicorns from the land. But when the unicorn faces the bull she is only saved by the wizard unintentionally transforming her into a human. In this form she faces the greatest of dangers: love.
Bulked up to just over 200 pages by stylistic embroidering, this wispy tale gives Beagle opportunity to speak of stories abstractly. Prince Lir, who falls in love with the literally anthropomorphized unicorn, is a tenderly reproachful treatment of the Hero. His exploits do not impress her: "it was a dragon’s head, the proudest gift anyone can give anyone. But when she looked at it, suddenly it became a sad, battered mess of scales and horns, gristly tongue, bloody eyes. I felt like some country butcher who had brought his lass a nice chunk of fresh meat as a token of his love. And then she looked at me, and I was sorry I had killed the thing." When the bull comes again, he casts himself between it and the unicorn in a futile gesture because "that’s what heroes are for."
As hero, Prince Lir stands representative of the traditional story form. "The true secret of being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. . . . Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story."
But there is no happy ending as such. The Last Unicorn is all about disproving the traditional story. Not because it disrespects the form, but because it loves it enough to make it real. This dichotomy between the expectations of the stereotype and the power of a true story is embodied in the tension between Lir and the unicorn. The wizard, Schmendrick, understands why she is unresponsive to the hero. "She is a story with no ending, happy or sad. She can never belong to anything mortal enough to want her."
In human form, where she is known as the Lady Amalthea, the unicorn finds herself pulled between these forces. The heroic, romantic expectations of story, and the truth of nature. The transience of mortality and its ideals, and the permanence of immortality. Her grasp on the latter wavers over time. Both kindness and cruelty belong to the illusory mortal realm, yet where once the unicorn so easily saw through the witch Mommy Fortuna’s spells, now Amalthea begins to soften toward Lir’s idealism. Even Schmendrick’s restoring her proper form cannot dissolve the memory of her experience as a mortal.
Style
It can’t be overstated how refreshing it is to read truly original fantasy. While there has lately been a turning away from Tolkienesque milieus, the writing remains rooted in uninspired prose, a morass created by earlier authors who were willing to copy Tolkien’s setting but unable to imitate his writing. (If anything, as fantasists have departed Tolkien’s milieus, the preponderant style of the genre has only grown grittier, if better accomplished.) But Beagle actually bothers to use words interestingly. For their own sake, rather than as stepping stones for an ‘epic’ plot.
Like the butterfly dancing on the unicorn’s horn he weaves a vibrant casing around his story. But as bored as I am with coarser writing, I must admit the effluence of embellishment grew wearying. Especially in its less subtle form, the simile. Often, as in the case below, not a sentence goes by without one or more "like" or "as" phrases, or at least a metaphor that attains the blunt quality of a simile.
He was the color of blood, not the springing blood of the heart but the blood that stirs under an old wound that never really healed. A terrible light poured from him like sweat, and his roar started landslides flowing into one another. His horns were as pale as scars. For one moment the unicorn faced him, frozen as a wave about to break.
While so much of this imagery is striking, and sometimes even poetic, it quickly becomes smothering. Particularly read aloud the prose seems overwrought. Soon even whimsical comparisons take on the kind of annoying earnestness exhibited in the authoring attempts of a fourteen year old (haven’t we all been there?). And yet, when more restrained, the writing is sweet, as it is here when Lir speaks to Amalthea of her nightmares: "I would enter your sleep if I could, and guard you there, and slay the thing that hounds you, as I would if it had the courage to face me in fair daylight. But I cannot come in unless you dream of me."
Recommendation
For all of its extravagance, The Last Unicorn holds one other great advantage over contemporary commercial fantasy: it is short. Though reading its style can feel like wading chest-deep, the plot is frugal. Beagle does not share the misconceived ideal of ‘epic’ that preponderates in current fantasy. While he knows the stereotyped Tale is not true, rather than put an operatic action-adventure in its place he purveys an understanding of true Story.
The Last Unicorn reflects the tension between the immortal truth of nature and the mortal yearning for simplistic ideals. Between reality and imagination. Between loneliness and unity. It ends without a victory, leaving its characters with painful memories that can only be cherished. In true stories that’s the only happily ever after we get.
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