Black Unicorn, by Tanith Lee

This time we are going to veer into the realm of young-adult fantasy fiction, and how we can find, even here, a gem or two. For the purposes of this review, and for my life, I am a fan of the following books.

Black Unicorn, the first in a trilogy of coloured unicorns, doesn’t sound all that interesting based on the title, or on the moody front cover of my particular copy, which features, you may be surprised to hear, a black horse with a big pointy horn on its forehead, rearing up in front of a night-time background with a huge dark fortress in the background. Yes, the protagonist is a teenage girl with red hair. But no, it’s not actually a story about teen romance, despite the audience or unicorn motif.

Tanaquil, our heroine (no, not the drug), lives with her mother in a fortress in the middle of the desert. Her mother, Jaive, is an aloof and absent-minded sorceress, more interested in her magical experiments than in spending time with her daughter. Tanaquil is now fed up with her life, with living in the same place for so long, with the chaos caused by Jaive’s magical spillage, and with having nobody besides the fortress retainers, guards and servants to actually talk to. Unlike her sorceress mother, she has no magical skills, aside from a knack with mending broken things – she’s even managed to fix the fortress’ lone cannon, amongst just about everything else in the place. But thankfully, everything changes with the sudden arrival of a strange little animal called a peeve, who for no apparent reason leads Tanaquil to a hoard of shining silver bones; the bones of something that could only be a unicorn.

So the setting isn’t complex or groundbreaking. Tanaquil has to use her mending skills to repair the unicorn skeleton, naturally bringing it back to life, and then drawing her away to the ensuing magical journey. The book wouldn’t actually be interesting were it not for the peeve, a small cat-like doggy-ish desert-dwelling creature which, due to living near Jaive’s fortress, has been rendered the ability to speak and understand human speech. It’s no Shrek’s Donkey, thank God, and still behaves like an animal – one without house-training. It speaks in short and simple words, only barely conveying what it wants to communicate to Tanaquil (usually about wanting bones, or to chase rats). It’s basically just a semi-wild Jack-Russell, with the ability to say what’s on its mind. Thankfully it attaches itself to Tanaquil, turning what could have been a mere ‘girl runs off after unicorn’ story into the tale of ‘girl in strange new place with troublesome half-sentient pet, while looking for a unicorn’. The peeve is the real heart of this book, adding a dab of humour to the plot, as well as to the character of Tanaquil. She wouldn’t be nearly so interesting if the peeve hadn’t taken a liking to her.

Fantasy as a genre has the tendency to take itself far too seriously, but the reason Black Unicorn is worthwhile is because it goes against this – it has a definite sense of humour, but without veering into outright comedy. It’s a rare combination, of a relatively decent and involving plot (albeit a simple and skittish one), but one that doesn’t take itself too seriously. The peeve is there to drive the story, providing more than a few smiles along the way, but it is by no means the weirdest or most humorous thing about the book itself. For a good example we must look to the rough mid-point of the book, when Tanaquil arrives at a strange new city – it’s a brilliantly written section in which the strange and not unfamiliar social customs of the locals causes her a few problems. In short, a slight mix-up over unlicensed trading, extortionate guild-membership fees and a ridiculous fish-weighing ceremony end up with Tanaquil on the verge of being clapped in weighted shoes and dropped in the sea. Naturally the peeve’s spontaneity and tendency to eat anything vaguely organic really helps in this situation.

The plot is a little hectic, but weirdly enough it seems to hold together well enough to make a satisfying story. On top of running away from home, chasing a unicorn across a desert and winding up in a strange new city, the book then deals out the issue of Tanaquil’s parentage, which brings to light the existence of a half-sister she never even knew about - someone who just happens to be a princess. After Tanaquil catches up with her sister Lizra, the unicorn reappears and wreaks havoc in the city, and Tanaquil has to find a way to send it back whence it came. As I said, a hectic plot. But it holds together well enough, and is a short enough book to make it no real challenge to follow.

While this review claims to be about Black Unicorn, I will devote a little space to mentioning the sequels, which conveniently turn it into a trilogy. The next book, Gold Unicorn, unfortunately forgot about its major strength; it abandoned much of the humour that made its predecessor worth reading. Tanaquil’s sister, Lizra, is now a self proclaimed Empress and has embarked on a campaign of world conquest – as you do, when you’re sixteen and you find yourself in charge of a principality – and she was so taken with the unicorn of the previous book that she decided to build her own gigantic steam-powered war machine which, wait for it, happens to be a massive golden unicorn. Most of the story involves Tanaquil hanging around her sister’s army, quietly disapproving, and witnessing one or two atrocities, before she, her peeve, Empress Lizra, Lizra’s lover the dashing Prince Honj, and a couple of unmemorable cannon-fodder guards, end up in some sort of hell-dimension. Aside from the heavy-handed ‘war is bad’ message, nothing actually happens in the book aside from Tanaquil’s arbitrary falling-in-love with Honj, and even that feels like a side-line to an absent plot. The lack of humour really shows in Gold Unicorn, and this time even the peeve is not up to usual form; it has become too tame, and learned to use more complicated words and even proper phrases, robbing his language of the charming simplicity that it once had. There are only a couple of things I actually like in this book, such as the ‘mousps’, a bizarre fusion of mice and wasps. Yes, these things actually appear in the book.

Red Unicorn, the third and last in the series, is a welcome return to form. Tanaquil, moping after the whole Honj affair, travels back to her mother’s fortress for a cup of tea, or something. The sorceress Jaive, however, has hooked up with the sorcerer Worabex, and the whole place has been turned upside-down much to Tanaquil’s chagrin. One of Jaive’s spells backfires, and Tanaquil finds herself knocked into a wacky parallel universe inhabited by a collection of alter-egos. Unlike Gold Unicorn, this one takes a silly, and otherwise boring plot and decides to have fun with it, just using it as an excuse to pile in the author’s wackiest and most endearing mind-spasms yet. Some of the things I can’t resist revealing are, first, the ‘sqwulfs’, hybrids between squirrels and wolves that voraciously hunt down nuts, devouring them without mercy; the rot-chair races, in which rotten chairs are dubiously affixed with wheels, to be pulled by tipsy horses and crewed by tipsy drivers (it’s pretty much destruction derby chariot-racing, but with alcohol. And you can use any sort of chair you want; it just has to be part rotted), and umbrellas are, inexplicably, referred to as rainshades. I love this. And the peeve undergoes a further bit of character development here, salvaging its lagging personality from the previous instalment and returning to that somewhat chaotic streak which made it so loveable in the first place. Aside from a sickeningly sweet ending to Red Unicorn, I’m giving this one a clean bill of health.

So there you have it – Tanith Lee’s variously coloured Unicorns. Aside from an iffy second book, they’re well worth a read. Black Unicorn is probably the one most deserving of rediscovery, simply in that it is an almost self-contained story, but Red Unicorn is definitely worth sticking around for if you enjoyed the first one.

Bibliostiary

Lee, Tanith. Black Unicorn. Orbit: St. Ives. (1994 [First Published 1991])

Lee, Tanith. Gold Unicorn. Orbit: St. Ives. (1995 [First Published 1994])

Lee, Tanith. Red Unicorn. Tom Doherty Associates: USA. (1997)