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Black Unicorn, by Tanith Lee
Mar. 20th, 2024 02:37 pmEver since Rush wrote this essay about Tanith Lee, I've been keeping half an eye out for the handful of books he considers her masterpieces. This is the first of them I've found (though I did read some of the Books of Paradys while I was waiting) and it's a sort of appetizer-masterpiece: the one whose first fifty pages are perfect and then... the rest isn't.
I was curious whether I'd feel the same. Happily and sadly, I pretty much did. I enjoyed the first fifty pages so much that I read them very quickly, glancing at the page count in alarm every so often as it ran out from under me. And then... It feels to me like Lee was in such a useful writerly frame of mind at the start of this book, or had come up with ideas so compellingly real to her, that place and people and plot all spun out together as a single object; and then she hit the part of her plan for the book which said, in big letters, 'I will work this out when I get there', and unfortunately she didn't. The book gets vague and wandering. Some good and interesting things happen but they're not brilliant, they're just... some more reasonable enough book.
There's a teenage girl living in a castle in the desert with her annoyingly sorcerous mother. It's comic and numinous - and I can see the castle and the people in my mind's eye right now - and I think you will enjoy reading about them very much if you treat them as belonging to a strikingly open-ended short story.
I was curious whether I'd feel the same. Happily and sadly, I pretty much did. I enjoyed the first fifty pages so much that I read them very quickly, glancing at the page count in alarm every so often as it ran out from under me. And then... It feels to me like Lee was in such a useful writerly frame of mind at the start of this book, or had come up with ideas so compellingly real to her, that place and people and plot all spun out together as a single object; and then she hit the part of her plan for the book which said, in big letters, 'I will work this out when I get there', and unfortunately she didn't. The book gets vague and wandering. Some good and interesting things happen but they're not brilliant, they're just... some more reasonable enough book.
There's a teenage girl living in a castle in the desert with her annoyingly sorcerous mother. It's comic and numinous - and I can see the castle and the people in my mind's eye right now - and I think you will enjoy reading about them very much if you treat them as belonging to a strikingly open-ended short story.
