The Last Unicorn by: Peter S. Beagle

 

“The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone.”  These words open Peter S. Beagle’s most famous novel The Last Unicorn, which perfectly encapsulates the loneliness that is at the core of the novel.  The unicorn is the last of her kind, the world having moved on from the need for great myths of Robin Hood and the like, the real magicians becoming less and less known, and cursed kingdoms finally falling to be ruled by a fair prince.  It’s Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey and Grimm’s fairy tales all wrapped up in one and Beagle knows it.  Originally published in 1968, Beagle took two years to write the completed manuscript, beginning as a very different story.  It got away from him so to speak, but that’s okay, the best stories often do.  I must confess, The Last Unicorn was not a story from my childhood, nor was it something that came into my life at a pivotal moment.  It’s a story I’d heard good things about, so I read it and like the original manuscript had with Beagle, it’s a story that perhaps got away from me rather quickly.  Read over a couple of days, Beagle’s prose is a beautiful reflection of fairy tales and what it means to exist in a rapidly changing world.  Beagle is directly evolving Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, except the elves haven’t left Middle Earth of choice in this metaphor.  A midnight carnival shows pale imitations of the great myths and legends, bar two, but people enjoy being fooled and will pay good money for it.

 

The old king Haggard has lived too long and wasted away with his son Lir, the evil king being the quintessential human villain, a villain of human apathy after gaining full power.  The magician Schmendrick only wants power for his own purpose while ex-bandit Molly Grue is incredibly cynical about myths and legends.  The first meeting of Molly Grue and the unicorn is the first and best showing of the novel’s thesis, Molly despairing for the unicorn did not come to her in her childhood.  She had to grow and move on, the unicorn eventually becoming human due to a moment of desperation on Schmendrick’s part, something that adds the bittersweet nature of the end of the novel, it follows Tolkien’s elves and leaves the land, though unlike the end of The Lord of the Rings, nobody can follow her into the sunset.  The love story that defines the back half of the novel, but it’s a love story that was doomed from the beginning.  The characters are still left at the end to make their own way in the world, changed forever, but still having to move on with their lives as does the rest of the world.  Beagle writes a novel that is intentionally contradictory in terms of its world, wrapping itself deeply in thematic relevance and lengthy prose, but always throwing in these little touches and impossible references that throws the reader off intentionally.

 

The Last Unicorn is a modern example of a universal story, emulating those told from parent to child with details changing but at its core having a deeper theme towards humanity and existence.  The characters are familiar, all being some direct reference to a previous tale that has entered the public consciousness, and it’s a book that is there to say it’s okay to grow up and change.  That’s just a necessary part of life.  While this review mainly made a few of the obvious allusions to Tolkien, it’s also very much a response to the writings of Lewis, and begins its own branching path in the development of fantasy as a storytelling medium.  Despite this branch not becoming the main branch of the genre, it’s a beautiful branch that brought a tear to my eye.  10/10.