The Last Unicorn

[avram]

I finished The Last Unicorn over dinner tonight. I should have read it long ago. I enjoyed it quite a bit, even though it makes use of a fictional trope I’m currently sick to death of: characters who are aware that they’re in a story. There’s a whole lot of recent fantasy — I’m thinking here especially of Gaiman-inspired fantasy comics — in which the characters do things for no reason other than that they’re in a particular kind of story, and talk about that fact while they’re doing it, and a little of that goes a long way for me, and I’ve had more than a little of it.

Anyway, Beagle does a little of it in The Last Unicorn, along with some deliberate use of anachronism to keep the reader from believing that the story’s set in some particular time and place, but he pulls it off, partly because his characters engaged my sympathies so well.

Another author who’s pulled off something very similar is Bruce Sterling, in Zeitgeist, but Sterling was doing something much more interesting and complicated there, as well as grounding his story in the real-world events of the last few years of the 20th century.

Comments

[mamishka.livejournal.com]

Beagle does a little of it in The Last Unicorn

Interesting ... I don't recall that aspect of the book at all. Hmmm! I'm also fond of his A Fine and Private Place. :)

[avram]

Schmendrick in particular talks a lot about being in a story.

[intelligentrix.livejournal.com]

I am currently re-reading Little Big by John Crowley, and one of the main themes is that the characters are in a Story, but not all of them know it, and it isn't a recognized story like, say, Little Red Riding Hood, where they know what's going to happen next. All they know is that it's a Story, and it's very long, and no-one knows the whole shape of it. It's very nicely done.

Peter Beagle's Stuff

[(Anonymous)]

Liked his early stuff but really didn't like PEOPLE OF THE AIR dod you ever read that
dmsherwood53@hotmail.com