[Dragaera] OT: Peter S. Beagle and the The Last Unicorn Screening Tour

[Philip Hart]

On Sat, 7 Sep 2013, FRIEDA2133 at aol.com wrote:

> Anyone read any of his other books?

I don't know that he's written anything as magical as _The Last Unicorn_, 
but I like most of his work very much.  _The Folk of the Air_ is pretty 
good, but there's a lot, really a lot, of 1980s Marin county and SCA, and 
the what-it's-like-to-experience-[spoiler omitted] part never works for 
me.  _The Innkeeper's Song_ and the associated stories in _Giant Bones_ 
are great, though not uniformly; a lot of excellent characterization and 
wonderful prose and storytelling, shallow but often gripping world-
building, sometimes as good as anywhere descriptions of magic - a less 
poetic, more rough-edged, but more human work than _TLU_.  _Tamsin_ is 
mostly not a fantasy about two girls and their cats - part extremely 
effective portrayal of early adolescence, part Beagle's usual attempt to 
describe the indescribable; I find large swaths of it more emotionally 
engaging and wrenching than his other work.  His first novel, _A Fine and 
Private Place_, is an amazing first novel - a ghost story with a lot of 
"Medicine for Melancholy" but more mainstream than sff and not on my list 
of must-rereads - compare say _Lincoln's Dreams_.

OTOH, while Beagle has a lot going for him - wonderful prose, great 
storytelling ability, a deep interest in and unsentimental love for his 
characters, the ambition to attempt to convey the unimaginable - somehow 
except for _TLU_ he hasn't written anything with a convincing ending, that 
everyone has to read right now.  I guess he's been more interested in 
playing the lute and living the life that comes through behind the lines. 
For me he's more Bradbury than Crowley, more OSC than UKLG.