Reviews for The Lion and the Unicorn

The average rating for The Lion and the Unicorn based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-12-04 00:00:00 Janet Bacom I read this because it was available free on Kindle (now I am on a "Kindle"-ing spree). This book carries with it a childhood memory for me. I used to buy comics from the Higginbothams' bookstall in the railway station (they still have stalls all over railway stations in South India, but carry mostly magazines) - Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Bugs Bunny... freely available in those days and costing the lordly sum of one rupee. My father on this occasion, however, decided to "improve" my reading and picked up a few children's books from the shelf. This book was one of them. It was a beautiful edition with a glossy cover and enthralling pictures, but my dad was not impressed. He told me there were much better books by Kipling (true!) and put it back on the shelf, and I went for my comic. But the book remained in memory. However, I am glad I did not get it then - I would have been totally lost! Because in this series of connected stories, Kipling does a masterly job of weaving together England's mythology, legend and history. Compered by the fairy "Puck" from The Midsummer Night's Dream, the narrators range from Puck himself, a knight, a roman soldier and a Jew. The timeline shifts between the mythic, sylvan past of the Island through the Roman occupation and medieval intrigues up to the signing of the Magna Carta. It is typical Kipling - each story is sandwiched between a couple of poems (which are sometimes much better than the tales). The mundane and the magical seamlessly weave together to create a brilliant tapestry, familiar to all Kipling fans. But the tales were, I felt, rather mediocre. From the creator of The Jungle Book one expected a bit more. The author's intention here - made explicit in the last poem - is to inculcate pride and love for the motherland in the heart of youngsters and maybe get them to study the culture of their country in detail. Very laudable, but it has not aged well like The Jungle Book or Just So Stories.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-01-15 00:00:00 Arron Downes The more familiar I become with Kipling's many short, fantastical works, the clearer it becomes that almost every fantasy author of the past century owes him a great debt. I have pointed out before that he has written works which lay out whole subgenres--blueprints which later authors like C.S. Lewis, H.P Lovecraft, Neal Gaiman, and Susanna Clarke have expanded upon. And in this collection, we can see yet another branch of influence. In several stories spanning centuries of English history, Kipling writes of war, politics, and adventure amongst the clash of conquerors and settlers of that island. Each story is full of unusual historical details and characters, woven closely together into a rich and varied tapestry where beauty, comedy, and tragedy are depicted side by side. It is this vividity of myriad emotions that I have come to see as the mark of a great and exciting tale of adventure. As Howard said of his greatest creation, Conan the Barbarian: "Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet..." Of the many authors who have followed after Howard, the great majority are lackluster, for though they all remember the 'gigantic melancholies', none recall the 'gigantic mirth'. And indeed, these tales of Kipling's are immediately reminiscent of the wild, strange adventures penned by Howard and Leiber. They both learned well the lesson that both magic and realism are dependent on a constant rush of strange yet naturalistic details. Any long-winded explanation is the death of a story, while innumerable implications of the greater world are its life. More than that, they resemble Kipling in form. The sorts of characters, places, events, and twists we see are immediately familiar to the connoisseur of Sword and Sorcery: piracy, doomed battles, monstrous apes, lost treasures, inscrutable foreign allies, mystery cults, ruthless generals, seers, &c. Tying all these tales together was a frame story taken from the English fairy tale tradition, with the familiar theme of modern children accidentally coming across ancient myths (though in this case, they are only listeners, not participants). Yet what fascinated me was how fantastical the stories themselves felt, despite the fact that they were not overtly magical. Even so, Kipling maintains a consistent tone of wonderment and strangeness, often by representing the world through the eyes of the characters, themselves. So many authors seem to think that including some elves and dragons will make a story wondrous, but for the most part, they are known quantities, not mysterious entities. We all know what dragons are, so their appearance in fantasy could hardly surprise us. No story will be fantastical if it is fundamentally familiar and predictable. It is not the color of a creature's skin that makes it otherworldly, it is how the creature is personified. It is simply impossible to make something fantastical without a strong sense of tone. So perhaps I should have been less surprised that I found in the thirty pages of one of these stories more complex characters, emotional depth, and sense of the mystical than I have in most five-hundred page books about yet another dragon war. Unfortunately, I found the last few stories dragged on a bit, lacking the conciseness and immediacy of the earlier ones. Kipling's attempt to tie all the stories together into a meaningful narrative about English identity was stretched a bit thin. Likewise, there is an uncomfortable implication of 'White Man's Burden' in the way the Romans treat the Picts--but if anything, the fact that he turns the same argument on his own people suggests that it is a comment about international power relations, and not race. Once more, Kipling shows the breadth of his imagination--the many periods, peoples, and stories he covered--and it's easy to see his influence among the best writers of fantasy and adventure. My List of Suggested Fantasy Books