The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Last Unicorn
Book Review: "Enchanting" is an understatement!
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought this book having been a fan of the movie since I can remember. Though some might say that unicorns are for children, at 22, I can still read this book over and over, and never be tired of it. Beagle's imagery and character development are fantastic.I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a good fairy-tale style fantasty story, but I recommend to primarily to anyone who has only seen the movie. While the movie itself is also wonderful, the book offers so, so much more.
The novel changes perspective several times. After the unicorn's meeting with Schmendrick the Magician much of the story is told through Schmendrick's point of view, it seems (in contrast to the movie, where the story is almost entirely told from the point of view of the unicorn). The book is very emotional, and the character development is supurb. Some things left out from the movie are the magician's background, and the story of the town of Hagsgate.
There are still parts of this book that ring in my head long after I read it. In a good way, that is.
Book Review: 1,000,000,000 stars
Summary: 5 Stars
I grew up watching this movie. This was one of my favorite cartoon movie when I was younger. It was such a well made movie. I thought that the voice of the Unicorn (Mia Farrow) was ever so enchanting for an immortal creature. I had tried over the years to find the movie, but couldn't find it. It had been out of print for quite some time. Well thanks for time and a little bit later I finally did get to buy the movie. The next thing I wanted to do was to find the novel and read it. I had wondered if the novel had the same power as the movie had. I was so happy to find out that it did. I was so happy to find out that the guy who wrote the screenplay for the movie was also the writer of the novel... Peter S. Beagle. I have read a few of his works since then and have been impressed... He is a great author. In a biography of himself he had said, that "The Last Unicorn" was the only novel that anyone ever identifies him with. If I were him, I would feel honored to have such a beautiful story to be remembered by.Book Review: 250 page epic. Beautiful and bittersweet.
Summary: 5 Stars
Buy this if you like original, well-written, heart-breaking, breath-taking, tightly-plotted fantasy. Don't buy it if you like bloated serial Tolkein rip offs.Book Review: ??
Summary: 5 Stars
I have never read this book but i really want to! the cartoon movie is my favorate movie and i have watched it so many times i know what happens but i still like it.Book Review: A Beautiful Allegory
Summary: 5 Stars
I have seen (and read) three types of fairytale fantasy published in the last century. The first is like Patricia C. Wrede's Enchanted Forest Chronicles: it is clever at the expense of fairy tales, mocking (usually gently) the tropes of the genre, often through metafictional techniques. This type does little for me. The second is like most of Patricia McKillip's work: it takes those same tropes completely seriously and (if done well, as in McKillip's case) reminds us why the tropes exist in the first place, because they have width and depth and resonance. This is one of my favorite branches of fantasy. The third is the rarest, because it's the most difficult: it goes beyond the form of the fairytale and into archetypal territory, quite literally writing myth.
The Last Unicorn is all three of these.
That is probably fitting, given that it is one of the classics in the genre. Being three things at once, it left me with a sense of. . . unevenness, though to be fair that sense came only in retrospect; Beagle's prose is gorgeous and sure, and I devoured the book in two large gulps then wished there was more. Reading a random sampling of reviews online just highlighted the unevenness, though, because so many people seemed to be reading entirely different books.
The first thread, the metafictional, humorous side of the novel, predictably worked least well for me, though it worked better than any of the other books of that type that I have read. All of the characters know they are in a fairytale, and they either accede to the needs of the tale or try to shape it to their own ends depending on their personalities. There is also a sprinkling of anachronisms, which I read as another metafictional device, but may just be a leftover from Beagle's original vision of the story, which was set in modern times. What made this thread work better for me than those books who rely solely on the metafictional device is that Beagle used those moments when the characters broke the fourth wall to feed into his thematic concerns, something I will get to in a bit.
The second thread, the straight-forward fairy tale, is exquisitely, heartbreakingly beautiful. Had Beagle written just this story I probably would have out-and-out loved it more, though it likely would not have lingered in my consciousness as long as I suspect this reading will. It has all sorts of fairytale tropes: the quest, the unlikely band of fellows, the evil crone and the evil king, the curse, a tragic romance. . . there's even a talking cat. This section is about finding one's true nature; it is also very much about love, and the way it makes heroes of anyone it touches. It also features the loveliest passages, like this one:
"Under the moon, the road that ran from the edge of her forest gleamed like water, but when she stepped out onto it, away from the trees, she felt how hard it was, and how long. She almost turned back then; but instead she took a deep breath of the woods air that still drifted to her, and held it in her mouth like a flower, as long as she could."
The third thread, the allegory, is why this book has so much weight, the reason so many people can read totally different books in it and love them all. There are actually two related allegories here: one, running through the first half of the book, is about perception, and the way we see only what we expect to see; the other, coming to the fore in the second half of the book, is about the unicorn as a sort of Platonic Form of beauty. The presence of these allegories makes the book fail in a lot of ways as a straight fantasy novel -- as some reviewers have noticed, there are no people in the world but those absolutely necessary to the story/message, and the world-building is nothing like internally consistent. But ultimately the allegory is the reason The Last Unicorn is deservedly a classic, in any genre.