Excerpt: The Last Unicorn, chapter 8 · 7:45pm Jan 4th, 2014
Chapter 8.
He was the color of blood, not the springing blood of the heart but the blood that stirs under an old wound that never really healed. A terrible light poured from him like sweat, and his roar started landslides flowing into one another. His horns were as pale as scars.
For one moment the unicorn faced him, frozen as a wave about to break. Then the light of her horn went out, and she turned and fled. The Red Bull bellowed again, and leaped down after her.
The unicorn had never been afraid of anything. She was immortal, but she could be killed: by a harpy, by a dragon or a chimera, by a stray arrow loosed at a squirrel. But dragons could only kill her - they could never make her forget what she was, or themselves forget that even dead she would still be more beautiful than they. The Red Bull did not know her, and yet she could feel that it was herself he sought, and no white mare. Fear blew her dark then, and she ran away, while the Bull's raging ignorance filled the sky and spilled over into the valley.
The trees lunged at her, and she veered wildly among them; she who slipped so softly through eternity without bumping into anything. Behind her they were breaking like glass in the rush of the Red Bull. He roared once again, and a great branch clubbed her on the shoulder so hard that she staggered and fell. She was up immediately, but now roots humped under her feet as she ran, and others burrowed as busily as moles to cut across the path. Vines struck at her like strangling snakes, creepers wove webs between the trees, dead boughs crashed all around her. She fell a second time. The Bull's hoofs on the earth boomed through her bones, and she cried out.
- from The Last Unicorn by Peter Beagle
Huh. I keep hearing about this book/movie. Apparently the book is pretty well recieved, and the movie is pretty faithful to the book? And it's score is done by the soft rock band America, a deeply wistful group I imagine would be perfect for this story. I imagine the novel is sort of like "The Phantom Tollbooth," an ostensibly children's novel that is in fact a delight to read for all ages. I should probably read/watch this.
I've been meaning to both watch and read this for some time. I actually have the movie right here, but do you think I'd be better off reading the book first?
1682172 I love the score, which last I checked has never been released except on the movie. The movie is faithful to the book, but not to the author; they never paid him. So do a little googling to figure out how to buy a version of the movie that Peter Beagle will get paid for.
I wouldn't call it a children's novel. It's more like something by William Goldman or James Thurber. Like The Princess Bride, the movie version is quite good but has had some of the sting and sadness taken out of it. The novel has a bit of a pro-death message, the usual malarkey about immortals being unable to love. I couldn't tell you what the overall message or theme is.
1682196 The book is more worthwhile to a writer. I like the book better, but it's a bigger time investment. The movie's scene right after the credits, with a ditzy butterfly, tries to be true to the book, but comes across like a goofy Saturday morning cartoon. It gets better.
It would be fun to watch as part of an animated movie marathon: The Hobbit, Wizards, The Last Unicorn.
Peter said there will be a live-action version of it soon, but you can't believe Hollywood talk.
I love how this line makes me stop to think for exactly as long as imagine the unicorn to have been frozen.
I need to grab that book again. The writing is simply fantastic, and the story imaginative beyond words.
Also, if you liked The Last Unicorn, check out some other stuff by Peter Beagle, like Tamsin, and The Unicorn Sonata (not a sequel, but it's also got Unicorns... come to think of it, Beagle could write a great episode of MLP).
I'm just waiting for them to release a DVD of The Midnight Angel, the opera based on his short story "Come, Lady Death."
Yes. Please, please, please do this. Like so many great authors, the guy is perpetually broke.
SPark and I saw this in a local independent theatre recently, on the tour that Peter S. Beagle has been doing with it. You get a Q&A session before the movie, so if you want to ask him about writing, that's a good opportunity. http://lastunicorntour.com/
The movie was part of the canon of her childhood, and she suggested that particular theatre to them, so it was rather inevitable that we'd go. It was pretty packed--bonus, though, was that that theatre had alcohol, and even a cider on tap.
If the crowd we were a part of is any indication, you will have the chance to ask your question. The main thing I remember is him describing himself as gardening-writer--he starts, things grow, they surprise him, and he tends and weeds them as best he can.
I keep meaning to read the book, it's been on my read-it-later list for years. Probably time I give the movie a rewatch, too. The whole thing with the harpy and I-can't-remember-the-woman's-name shaped and defined that particular type of relationship in my mind.
1682232 I think this is the first time I've seen Bakshi mentioned by anyone in this fandom. Good job.
I read the book in high school, after I'd finished all the Tolkien I could find and was desperately searching for more like it. This was back in the 70's when there wasn't a lot of fantasy on the shelves so you read what you could get. Fortunately most of it was good: the produce of years that had threshed away the merely fashionable and left the good stuff behind. Besides nobody had yet thought of doing cheap Tolkien knockoffs.
In this way I first encountered Dunsany, via The King of Elfland's Daughter, Fletcher Pratt's The Well of the Unicorn*, Fritz Lieber's tales of Fahfrd and the Grey Mouser, and of course Beagle. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/ But to be young was very heaven!"
I fell in love immediately with both the story and the style, which were so aptly matched: spare but not Spartan, graceful but not affected, passionate but not fulsome. You got your happy ending, too--for which the characters paid in blood. I knew that if I couldn't write like Tolkien (and even then I suspected that nobody else could write like Tolkien), I would be delighted to write like this. And I suppose I've been trying to do so ever since.
I very nearly didn't see the movie, as in my youth I considered the Rankin-Bass Hobbit a blood libel upon the book (I've seen it again recently--I was right). But I'm glad I did: as you point out elsewhere, it starts out Saturday-morning-cartoon goofy, but it gets better.
And through the years I've been surprised to see how many trends it seems to have started within the genre, specifically the ironic/affectionate take on traditional fantasy tropes, and the use of modern speech (as opposed to "fantaspeak") and even anachronism. And the characters themselves seem to con other parts: Captain Cutty and Jack Jingly as Vizzini and Fezzik, and of course Schmendrick as Rincewind.
Beagle himself seems to be that rarest of creatures, a "purple unicorn," as they say: a genuinely good writer who is also a genuinely good person. His career, unfortunately, points out the gods do indeed stand up for bastards, and no one else.
*In just that cover, too: back then the Brothers Hildebrand could make anything sell, even a 30-year-old William Morris fanfic.
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