In which the wrong beings get in the sea

[bloodygranuaile]

 I read Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn in my freshman seminar, and I have no idea what happened to my print copy. But I got an ebook version in a Humble Bundle a couple of years ago, so recently, I read it again.

 

The Last Unicorn is both a fairy tale and sort of a send-up of fairy tales; it's got a lot of flowery atmospheric language that doesn't always make concrete sense, and also a lot of jokes and anachronisms and funny names. I remember not really getting it when I first read it; I may have been too old to think it was cute but too young to come back around to it as an adult with a full appreciation for nerdy jokes in children's literature. This time around I liked it a lot more; I enjoy metafiction and this has some absolutely wonderful commentary on itself.

 

The basic plot is that a unicorn is doing her thing one day, living in the woods being glorious and not paying too much attention to the world of humans, when she overhears some hunters talking about how there are no more unicorns left in the world. Our unicorn is very bothered by this, and leaves her wood to undertake a quest to find out what happened to the rest of them. On the way she meets a butterfly that talks in riddles, an extremely talentless magician called Schmendrick, an evil circus troupe of caged creatures--most of whom are regular animals glamoured to appear as mythical creatures, but which does include a real harpy--a Robin Hood-esque troupe of forest thieves headed by a guy who's only in it for the folk ballads to be written about him, and some other goofy episodes. Traveling with Schmendrick the Magician and Molly Grue, the ex-girlfriend of the Robin Hood wannabe, the unicorn eventually makes her way to the kingdom of King Haggard, whose Red Bull (the animal, not the energy drink) has driven all the other unicorns into the sea. Then there's more riddles and magic and a difficult stint as a human, during which King Haggard's son falls in love with her and becomes a hero, and eventually the unicorns are released from the sea but obviously I'm not going to tell you how; that would be spoilers.

 

The stone cold best part of this entire book is the sequence with Captain Cully and his band of not especially merry men, a bunch of second-rate vagrants who never actually do anything heroic. This lack of heroism has not stopped Captain Cully from writing a whole bunch of folk ballads about his own daring exploits, and he makes Schmendrick and the unicorn listen to a bunch of them. This section in the book makes a lot of jokes about the '60s folk music anthropology scene, which I now know just enough about the history of folk music scholarship to find absolutely fucking hilarious. The second-best part of the book might be the deliberately irritating skull that really wants a drink of wine; he is highly relatable.

 

It is otherwise difficult for me to talk much about this book except to say that, while very strange and not at all naturalistic, it works a lot better than I remember it working. It is, in fact, absurd and delightful, and I'm very glad I gave it another shot.