The Last Unicorn

Installment #5 in the Book Reviews for Melanie series.

Also a book review for The 48-Hour Book Challenge, though I began editing the review earlier. Obviously I'll only count the time I spent on it during the Challenge!


The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
Read: 12/2/11-12/4/11

The Last Unicorn is so beautiful it hurts. It's a perfect little gem of a book. (And I love the cartoon, too, which if I'm recalling correctly I actually saw before the book. In some ways, contrary to more purist ideas and my own inclination, movies before books can be a good order, because it seems it can lead more often to loving both. And wow, the cartoon is cheap right now, I should get it...)

I need to read it again. I can't do it justice here, otherwise. Reading it again is no great sacrifice. I would do it before writing this review, but I'm attempting to write my reviews much faster, and will accept no excuses delaying any of them. So, bother.

Obviously I must read it again at some point, though, if not right this instant. Not only would I want to because the book is good, but Patrick Rothfuss says I should read it again. It's right there. On the cover.

Speaking of Patrick Rothfuss, as one can tell from the cover, he, um, very very much likes it. He talks about it a lot, but this is one of my favorites that I could find... language warning, but... yeah. The part at the top, before he gets to Tad Williams, though the whole thing is good.

Oh, one other thing. So beautiful it hurts, sure. But... there's humor, whimsy, silliness, too. It's not all dignified or quite what you would expect. It's an odd blend, but again, pretty much perfect.

I mean, the incompetent magician is named Schmendrick. Yeah. It's hard to be very dignified with a name like that. And he pretty much is the incompetent magician, the standard by whom all others shall be judged. In the words of my edition's generic blurb, "...a kind of poor man's Merlin whose devotion to the exquisite creature he follows is exceeded only by his mediocrity in magic."

Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful book.


"'How can it be?' she wondered. 'I suppose I could understand it if men had simply forgotten unicorn [sic] or if they had changed so that they hated all unicorns now and tried to kill them when they saw them. But not to see them at all, to look at them and see something else--what do they look like to one another, then? What do trees look like to them, or houses, or real horses, or their own children?'

"Sometimes she thought, 'If men no longer know what they are looking at, there may well be unicorns in the world yet, unknown and glad of it.' But she knew beyond both hope and vanity that men had changed, and the world with them, because the unicorns were gone. Yet she went on along the hard road, although each day she wished a little more that she had never left her forest."


"'It's a rare man who is taken for what he truly is,' he said. 'There is much misjudgment in the world. Now I knew you for a unicorn when I first saw you, and I know that I am your friend. Yet you take me for a clown, or a clod, or a betrayer, and so must I be if you see me so. The magic on you is only magic and will vanish as soon as you are free, but the enchantment of error that you put on me I must wear forever in your eyes. We are not always what we seem, and hardly ever what we dream. Still I have read, or heard it sung, that uncorns [sic] when time was young, could tell the difference 'twixt the two--the false shining and the true, the lips' laugh and the heart's rue.'"

And on a smaller scale, a good representative phrase I noticed and loved: "When Schmendrick looked at her again he had managed to pull his face together, but it was still struggling to escape from him."

The rest of what I'm going to quote is scented faintly of spoilers, so to those who are sensitive to those strains, read no further. They are so good (and so sideways to any true spoilers) that I can't help myself. I quote on, for the beautiful, beautiful themes.


"'Fools, fools and children! It was a lie, like all magic! There is no such person as Robin Hood!' But the outlaws, wild with loss, went crashing into the woods after the shining archers, stumbling over logs, falling through thorn bushes, wailing hungrily as they ran.

"Only Molly Grue stopped and looked back. Her face was burning white.

"'Nay, Cully, you have it backward,' she called to him. 'There's no such a person as you, or me, or any of us. Robin and Marian are real, and we are the legend!'"


"'The hero has to make a prophecy come true, and the villain is the one who has to stop him--though in another kind of story, it's more often the other way around. And a hero has to be in trouble from the moment of his birth, or he's not a real hero. It's a great relief to find out about Prince Lír. I've been waiting for this tale to turn up a leading man.'

"The unicorn was there as a star is suddenly there, moving a little way ahead of them, a sail in the dark. Molly said, 'If Lír is the hero, what is she?'

"'That's different. Haggard and Lír and Drinn and you and I--we are in a fairy tale, and must go where it goes. But she is real. She is real.'"


"'...How can anything that is going to die be real? How can it be truly beautiful?'...

"'I was born mortal, and I have been immortal for a long, foolish time, and one day I will be mortal again; so I know something that a unicorn cannot know. Whatever can die is beautiful--more beautiful than a unicorn, who lives forever, and who is the most beautiful creature in the world.'"


There. It's alright, you can come out now. I'm done.

Imagination

Now for the second of the two notes from facebook originally addressed to the Fantastical Lit class, seeing Mom's dementia through the lens of, well, fantastical lit.

"Imagination." It was written on 10-12-11, based on the class session from 10-5-11, "The Journey," which was based on The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien, as well as on the movie version of The Two Towers, and Greenwitch and The Grey King by Susan Cooper (books three and four of her five-book "The Dark Is Rising Sequence," respectively). Here it is:

I keep relating the Fantastical Lit discussions to Mom's dementia. This week I didn't think of anything particularly insightful -- pretty much just, "memory loss = bad," but the questions from last week are still haunting me.

I hate to keep bringing up an illustration so negative, but... obviously it's very important to me. And it feels a bit odd to talk about this very much with a group of people I don't know very well yet, but... I keep thinking about it. And it's tied in with our discussions.

So here's what I keep wondering: I can imagine a time when my mom won't recognize me anymore. But should I? Will it help me make peace with her illness? Would I stop mourning each new milestone, each major piece of memory she loses, and would that be good? Would I then be able to be more grateful for all the things she still remembers, right now? Or, imagining the degeneration, would I become more like Denethor?

How do I keep both "the world shouldn't be like this" and the preparation for the inevitable in my head? By focusing on the good in the midst of the evil?

May I never grow callous and bitter,
May I never cease to protest.
For the world ought to be beautiful
For the world, it shouldn't be so.

The world is beautiful. But not as it should be.

Thoughts, comments? I really would like input from others on this one.

Faerie and Dementia

I've taken pains to import all of my blog posts to facebook. I add them as notes, so that I can see them collected all together, and then I add them as updates so they show up in news feeds. But there are a couple notes from facebook that I haven't put on my blog, and I'd like to.

There are two that I can think of. They both went on facebook rather than here originally because they were related to a class I was sitting in on, and mostly the thoughts were addressed to people in the class. At first. Didn't get as many comments as I hoped there, though, and they have to do with Mom, so this seems like a good place, too. Feel free to skip over these if you've seen them before.

This first one, "Faerie and Dementia," was written on 9-7-11, and was based on a class session based on the movie "Spirited Away" and these books and stories: Phantastes by George MacDonald, "Smith of Wootton Major" by J.R.R. Tolkien, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, and Lud-in-the-Mist, by Hope Mirrlees. However, when I wrote it I was primarily thinking of Phantastes. Here it is:

Preliminary thoughts on tonight's Fantastical Lit session, "That Bonny Path":
1) Faerie is a place of heightened reality and it compresses growth.
2) Many people discover who they are in Faerie.

Therefore, Mom's dementia is like something from Faerie. One of the EVIL things from Faerie, granted, but still Faerie. Fr. David told me dementia seems to compress relationships, and I know it's been a weird sort of mirror, showing me aspects of myself I hadn't seen before.

Mom's obscured, as by a Fey mist, but the pieces of her I can still see, the pieces that aren't actually deceptive, give me a heightened sense of who she is. My reactions are intensified as well, and I see pieces of myself reflected back from the mist.

Dementia is too complicated to represent in Faerie as only a single obstacle. It could be anything from a life-sucking ogre to a mere veil of illusion, masking some grand lady. But whatever it is, how would the hero most nobly respond? How would he or she meet the trial and come out, farther down the path, as a better person?

Current tactic? Mostly ignore it and concentrate on other aspects of life. Yeah, that doesn't seem like it would end well. It's true the pressure's off right now -- before, I was also dealing with the stresses of a new job, plus some other hormonal issues. Everything beat down. It's easy, when I'm not feeling so depressed, to say, "Let's not go there." Heck, I genuinely feel good right now!

But in Faerie, if my spirits have lifted, it is not so that I can ignore the obstacle still standing in my path.

On the other hand, it's not my responsibility to guide the bright path into a darker valley, if that isn't where the road is going. The answer is not to beat my spirits back down, or to retrace my steps or circle back to where I've been before. Hmm.

But the ogre's road and mine seem to lie together for some distance. How does one accompany an ogre without being eaten? And respect the lady in the ogre's clutches, when one can't save her?