Book Review: The Last Unicorn
Dec. 19th, 2008 10:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerHappy thing for the day: I have the most beautiful Victorian-esque wrapping paper ever. It makes me so happy inside that I don't even mind wrapping presents.
***
I’ve finished The Last Unicorn. It may be the most beautiful book I read all year.
It’s a very fairy tale book. There’s something vaguely medieval in the kings and villages and chain mail, yet there’s a prince who reads a magazine and a butterfly that mentions having to catch the A train. It clearly takes place in our world—there’s talk of Robin Hood and Pliny—but there’s also a magician who works true magic, and no one seems to find that odd.
The effect is disorienting but not off-putting. It’s so obviously intentional, and there are so many such references, that it makes the book seem unmoored from time and space instead of merely confused about them.
But I love most about this book is the language. It makes my poetry-loving little heart sing—The Last Unicorn is a novel in form, but its really more like poetry in prose. “Their villages lay bald as bones between knifelike hills where nothing grew, and they themselves had hearts unmistakably as sour as boiled beer”—the alliteration! the rhythm! the similes! The similes!: old warriors with “teeth as rusty as their casques and corselets,” castle spires “like the horns of a dilemma, unicorn hooves that “sang by like cymbals,” and on and on and on.
Reading this book is like walking down a path lined with jujubes, except unlike with candy it never grows tiresome. You’re just reading along and, oh look!: “The rutted footprints of the Red Bull were growing mellow with mallow.” Mellow with mallow. Isn’t that beautiful?
It pains me, then, that as much as I love the language in the book I don’t love the book itself. I don’t dislike it; I enjoyed it, I would probably enjoy rereading it (I certainly had a good time flipping through finding quotes for this review. Do you know how hard it was limiting myself?), but my enjoyment is of the intoxicated poesy geek variety. There isn’t an emotional connection.
I have no idea why, because the book punches pretty hard on a lot of topics I find interesting and affecting—loss, death, the intersection of belief and reality—but I’m just not feeling it. I didn’t feel connected to the characters—I didn’t dislike them, or think they were made of cardboard, there wasn’t anything wrong with the book, I just couldn’t connect.
I wonder if it might be an effect of the language itself. I’ve had similar reactions whenever I’ve read Ursula Le Guin or Patricia McKillip—the language is beautiful, but I can’t care about the characters. It’s just not there.
Which is too bad. But the problem is with me, not the book, so I would still highly recommend The Last Unicorn.
***
I’ve finished The Last Unicorn. It may be the most beautiful book I read all year.
It’s a very fairy tale book. There’s something vaguely medieval in the kings and villages and chain mail, yet there’s a prince who reads a magazine and a butterfly that mentions having to catch the A train. It clearly takes place in our world—there’s talk of Robin Hood and Pliny—but there’s also a magician who works true magic, and no one seems to find that odd.
The effect is disorienting but not off-putting. It’s so obviously intentional, and there are so many such references, that it makes the book seem unmoored from time and space instead of merely confused about them.
But I love most about this book is the language. It makes my poetry-loving little heart sing—The Last Unicorn is a novel in form, but its really more like poetry in prose. “Their villages lay bald as bones between knifelike hills where nothing grew, and they themselves had hearts unmistakably as sour as boiled beer”—the alliteration! the rhythm! the similes! The similes!: old warriors with “teeth as rusty as their casques and corselets,” castle spires “like the horns of a dilemma, unicorn hooves that “sang by like cymbals,” and on and on and on.
Reading this book is like walking down a path lined with jujubes, except unlike with candy it never grows tiresome. You’re just reading along and, oh look!: “The rutted footprints of the Red Bull were growing mellow with mallow.” Mellow with mallow. Isn’t that beautiful?
It pains me, then, that as much as I love the language in the book I don’t love the book itself. I don’t dislike it; I enjoyed it, I would probably enjoy rereading it (I certainly had a good time flipping through finding quotes for this review. Do you know how hard it was limiting myself?), but my enjoyment is of the intoxicated poesy geek variety. There isn’t an emotional connection.
I have no idea why, because the book punches pretty hard on a lot of topics I find interesting and affecting—loss, death, the intersection of belief and reality—but I’m just not feeling it. I didn’t feel connected to the characters—I didn’t dislike them, or think they were made of cardboard, there wasn’t anything wrong with the book, I just couldn’t connect.
I wonder if it might be an effect of the language itself. I’ve had similar reactions whenever I’ve read Ursula Le Guin or Patricia McKillip—the language is beautiful, but I can’t care about the characters. It’s just not there.
Which is too bad. But the problem is with me, not the book, so I would still highly recommend The Last Unicorn.
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Date: 2008-12-20 10:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-20 06:15 pm (UTC)Is that a new icon? It's very orange. I approve.
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Date: 2008-12-20 08:02 pm (UTC)It's not so much a new icon as one I never use. It's really pretty though.