As a child, The Last Unicorn was my favourite film. Its sumptuous depiction of magical beasts and a suitably noble quest delighted my growing imagination, adding characters and colours to the mythic landscape of my private fantasy world. As a teenager I discovered (and promptly sped through) the book (by chance, my father had an old paberback copy in his library), falling in love with the story again, albeit for different reasons. It seems right that I nurtured a love of the film first, and the book later, as the book is much more poignant about adult experience. As I got older, leaping into my twenties, I found that I revisited this story many times, recognising new resonances with the characters, and their hopes, and the inevitable tragedy of their fates.
It isn't a ghost story, but at its heart are themes which plant the seeds for ghostly legacies: that things must end although stories may continue. It recognises also the role of characters in the story; that they have their parts to play within a wider narrative, and are not the beginning or the end of that script. There is a sense, particularly as you near the end of Peter Beagle's tale, that the consequences were always inevitable. Despite the crossroad of choice in the Red Bull's lair in which Amalthea, now human, may decide to remain in the cast of her mortal form and marry the prince she has fallen in love with, we know, deep down, that this can't happen. Even though she begs Schmendrick the magician to let her remain as she is, it is ultimately her mortal lover, Prince Lir, who knows that "...things must happen when it is time for them to happen. Quests may not simply be abandoned... The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story." While Schmendrick remarks that "...there are no happy endings, because nothing ends..." he is refering to the grander scheme of things. Mortals, after all, know above all else that some things must end.
The Last Unicorn is a story about the agony of endings, about the agony of not being able to hold onto that which is beautiful and wonderful and which you wished would last eternally. It is also a story about the agony of finding that you will not have the fate you wanted. This theme is further illustrated by the morose antagonist King Haggard, whose touch corrodes all that is boyant and good. A jealous gaoler, he keeps all the unicorns but Amalthea captive in the sea, so he can watch them at his leisure and feel something other than emptiness.
"I suppose I was young when I first saw them... Now I must be old - at least I have picked many more things up than I had then, and put them all down again. But I always knew that nothing was worth the investment of my heart, because nothing lasts, and I was right, and so I was always old. Yet each time I see my unicorns, it is like that morning in the woods, and I am truly young in spite of myself, and anything can happen in a world that holds such beauty." Haggard knows but loathes the limit of the mortal world. He is quintessentially a tragic figure, for he recognises and knows joy, but is ruined by the knowledege that it is fleeting. Such understanding is all consuming, and his rejection of the world around him sees it manifest as cold and grey and withering. His hunger for a recapturing of that moment of youthful joy is a greedy one, motivated by his misery, for his need to deny the frailty and age that chains him to his mortal life and its subsequent boundaries. In the end, he could not hold it forever. But then, he knew she was the last... and, as the magician Mabruk decreed, the last would bring his doom. There must always be a last. And, as our protagonists notion, unicorns may go unnoticed for a long time, but not forever.
The story also communicates a painful melody about the loss of childhood. A nostalgia for youth is demonstrated by another character, Molly, who joins Schmendrick and Amalthea in their quest to find the other unicorns after their escape from outlaws with whom she was assocaited. As the unicorn steps from behind a copse of trees, Molly's eyes fill with tears: "How dare you! How dare you come to me now... when I am this." For Molly, the unicorn is the visitor of young women, full of hope and their own innocent magic, and she cannot bare for that visitation to find her in the creases of late middle age, when the hope of maidenhood has gone and she is a woman of the world who has accepted her lot.
I found Molly's sadness particularly moving when I was in my late twenties. I remembered that longing for a sight of unicorns, for a recognition from the magical when I believed in all its possibilities. I'm 31 now, and sometimes wonder how I might feel if, after all those years, a unicorn stepped onto my path. A similar sadness perhaps, because my adult eyes would never see a unicorn as my childhood eyes would have done, and I fear I am beyond the rapture of pure, simple magical experience when one has no real concept of what the future will bring them.
At the end of the story, Amalthea is once again a unicorn. While she lamented that she would not be able to love her prince when recast into her immortal form, she watches him from the hill and remembers. It is the beginning of a new life, despite the return to her former immortal body. There is a sense in the story that immortality is something pure and untainted, it is always as the mortal young are so briefly, by the very nature that it is beyond that thing that ruptures mortals so: death. Before returning to her forest, she visit Schmendrick and Molly one last time. While Molly sleeps, Schmendrick regrets that he has done her a harm that he cannot undo. She understands this with a new uncertainty about what will befall her. "...I do not know if I will live contentedly... I have been mortal, and some part of me is mortal yet. I am full of tears and hunger and the fear of death, though I cannot weep, and I want nothing, and I cannot die." And yet... "My people are in the world again. No sorrow will live in me as long as that joy - save one, and I thank you for that too." The quest ended as it was supposed to, although unicorns will be coveted by magic, and may as well have remained in the sea for most mortals in the world. Similar fantasies written by contemporary Western authors have leant toward this order of things. After all, such magical things are banished by science.
The prince will mourn his lost love until he dies, and perhaps some ghostly essence of that will continue when he does not. The unicorn will mourn her lost love always. She has grown older, and cannot entirely reverse that. Once one has bloomed into adulthood you can never be a child again. Both Amalthea and the prince are powerless to be anything other than what they are now, and while there was great joy and love and beauty in their time together, they must go their separate ways. Regret, as something ghostly, weaves between Beagle's lines, just as his story recognises the sorrow of our mortal condition. We will only be young once, and we will not live forever. Somethings, however, deliver us into the wrappings of regret's unhappy bandages that stick to us because it is the nature of what they are, but which we would not free ourselves from even if we could. The unicorn had to seek others of her kind, in the beginning, because she was lonely. Once we have a regret of this kind, it is with us always... and yet, there is a comfort in the memory of what it stems from that makes it worthwhile. This seems relevant for an understanding of the nature of an aspect of our consciousness, and perhaps that is what this story primarily deals with, and what it argues we must carry if we wish to really live. Loneliness is always worse than regret.
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