Today, we travel to a mystical forest. Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn has long lingered on my shelf, glimmering like the luminous white coat of the eponymous creature. I pulled it down for a quick read and was soon immersed in a fairy tale full of momentum, like a unicorn galloping across the land at blinding speed.
A unicorn lives in a forest. She has no name—she doesn’t need one. She exists in her beautiful clearing, where time doesn’t seem to affect her. Her life is simple, beautiful. One day, she hears two passing humans discussing how all unicorns have vanished, taken from the world by a mysterious power. The unicorn leaves the safety of her heavenly dwelling and seeks the truth about her kind. She encounters a travelling carnival of oddities, a band of rogues, and an off-kilter kingdom along the way. Eventually, she learns the truth about her people and many other truths about life outside the wood.
The Last Unicorn feels like the very beast at the heart of its story. I was left wondering what was real and what wasn’t, almost as though the narrative was caked in an ethereal sheen. This seems to be Beagle’s goal, as the book is drenched in fairy-tale-esque prose, characters, and themes. For me as a reader, this requires delicate balance. I tend to prefer visceral, crunchy scenes that showcase the action and velocity of a book. The minutiae can make or break a story for me. In this case, I think Beagle straddles the line, almost flirts with it, and largely succeeds.
Elements of the book feel deliberately esoteric and interpretable. The story isn’t couched in a specific time or place. The people aren’t evocative of a particular historical kingdom (though there are many moments of distinct medieval feel). The setting still feels magical, from the carnival of “rare” beasts (if you know you know, and I won’t spoil it here) to the barren kingdom of King Haggard, where the story comes to a head. The unicorn herself is nestled in the same translucent aura, a being just beyond our understanding who deigns to exist among humans. She travels with the magician Schmendrick and the maiden Molly Grue, who enjoy her company even as they struggle to understand her.
The story coalesces into a confrontation with the Red Bull, believed to be the power behind the unicorns’ disappearance. It lives in or around the castle of King Haggard and wishes to eliminate all unicorns from the world. After a brief confrontation with the Red Bull, Schmendrick pulls on his well of magic (which is limited) and turns her into a human. The Red Bull stops pursuing her, but she soon begins to experience telltale human emotions: love, joy, sadness, and more. In her human form and under the name Amalthea, the unicorn starts to lose her unicorniness as she becomes more and more human.
The remainder of the plot is best kept behind the curtain, but I’ll mention that it has a tragic-but-hopeful feel. It subverts the “happily ever after” you might expect from a fairy tale and portrays an honest and melancholy lesson for readers to chew on.
I left The Last Unicorn feeling a bit off kilter, like I had been altered in some small way but didn’t know how. It’s the kind of book that worms its way into your psyche and changes how you think in subtle ways that you may never know. While I certainly missed the epic action of the books I usually seek, this one had a lot going for it, thanks to Beagle’s deft storytelling.
Rating: The Last Unicorn – 8.0/10
