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The Last Unicorn | ||||||||||||||||||
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s Peter Beagle's 1968 novel The Last Unicorn begins, a unicorn who lives alone in a distant wood overhears two men proclaiming that she is the last of her kind. Tentatively, reluctantly, she leaves her forest to seek out the truth and find her missing people. Along the way, she learns that humans have forgotten how to see unicorns; most of the people who look at her see only a white horse, and the few who recognize her almost always want to harm or capture her. The few exceptions include Schmendrick, a kindly but thoroughly incompetent wizard who looks younger than he seems, and Molly Grue, a harsh but sentimental woman who lives with a hapless band of Robin Hood wannabes. Together, the three companions explore what happened to the unicorn's kin. In the process, she learns what being human means, meets a prince named Lír, and becomes the first unicorn in the world to know regret.
In the first completely unabridged audiobook edition of The Last Unicorn, Beagle himself reads his novel, and in some cases even sings the songs he put in his characters' mouths. Over the course of nearly seven and a half hours, he tells the whole story, with chapter breaks marked by musical interludes composed by Jeff Slingluff.
As a bonus for audiobook purchasers, Beagle has written a sequel novella to Last Unicorn: In that story, Two Hearts, a young girl named Sooz loses a friend to a rampaging griffin and seeks out help from Lír, who is now the king of his country. Along the way, she meets Molly Grue and Schmendrick, who seem little changed from their Last Unicorn days, and she witnesses their reunion with the now-elderly Lír and their unicorn. Conlan Press is releasing the story as a 64-page limited-edition chapbook, which comes free with any edition of the audiobook—MP3 download, MP3 on CD, or audio-CD set—for the first 3,000 customers. As an additional bonus, the seven-CD audio set comes with a signed foldout poster and an eighth CD, featuring an hourlong interview with Beagle himself.
Last was only the first
Peter Beagle's gruff, funny, slightly nasal voice isn't typical for an audiobook reader, but it fits wonderfully with his early prose and his gruff, funny style. Last Unicorn is a lovely, tender fairy tale full of wry humor and odd little anachronisms, but it's also a masterpiece of colorful, lyrical metaphors and images: "Mabruk's semblance of affability vanished like a spark on snow, and with the same sound," runs a typical sentence, or "Like a newborn child, the magician wept for a long time before he could speak." Beagle's writing sounds terrific when read aloud; Beagle comes across like a friendly uncle telling an exceptionally pretty bedtime story. He doesn't push too hard to distinguish his characters with funny voices or accents, thank goodness, though his Rukh does sound more than a little like the Rukh from Rankin-Bass' 1982 animated adaptation of Last Unicorn. Mostly, though, Beagle just reads with the calm sense of wonder that best fits the book.
Hearing Beagle sing his songs is a special bonus—apparently not all the song-poems in Last Unicorn have tunes, but when they do Beagle croons them warmly and a cappella, except for Schmendrick and Molly's final song, which gets full, hearty orchestration. Slingluff's string-heavy music ranges in style and tone, from medieval chamber music to contemporary folk, and from exceedingly simple single-instrument lines to sweet, complicated counterpoint. There's so much variety that it actually becomes a draw just to see how each new chapter will begin.
As for Two Hearts, it's a bit of a jolt how plain the prose is by comparison to the novel, though it shouldn't be a surprise, considering Beagle's development over the intervening 37 years. It's good to know what happened to the characters after the book ended, though it's interesting that Last Unicorn ended with hints toward a sequel, but Two Hearts doesn't answer its unanswered questions. Which leaves the story open for yet another sequel—which would, in a way, be a shame. Because Last Unicorn is an altogether unique and gorgeous book, and it stands alone. This beautiful new edition once again proves that.
As of this writing, well over half of the limited-edition copies of Two Hearts were already gone, but Beagle fans who don't order the audiobook in time can take heart ... it's scheduled as the cover story for October's edition of Fantasy & Science Fiction. — Tasha
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