If you want to get bookish people talking, just mention “romantasy.” From the legions of readers who adore the combination of romance and fantasy to purists who disdain everything under the new portmanteau label, everyone has an opinion.
Yet the mashup isn’t really so new, given that early European novels (or “romances,” as they were called then) combined courtly love and fantastical adventures. Duxbury author Katherine Arden captures some of the heady atmosphere of those premodern flights of fancy in her new novel, The Unicorn Hunters, out on June 2. Set on “the vibrant cusp between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,” as Arden writes in her afterword, it’s a historical fantasy in a literary style, weaving both romantic and supernatural elements into the life of a real person: Anne of Brittany (1477-1514). The proportions of fact and fantasy shift over the course of the story as Arden explores a tantalizing might-have-been.
The Unicorn Hunters is set in 1490, when Brittany was still an independent duchy coveted by France. Anne inherited the title of duchess from her father, who had fought the French to maintain his realm’s independence — but not for long. In historical fact, Anne was forced to marry King Charles VIII of France at age 15, beginning the process of Brittany’s eventual subjugation into a French province.
Here’s where Arden’s fictional rendering diverges. Her Anne is older — about 19 — and well aware that her fate as the female scion of a noble house is to sacrifice herself to a politically advantageous marriage. “Passion was for ordinary flesh,” Arden writes, “not for a body that could be bartered and conquered and offered like territory.” But this resourceful Anne is determined to preserve Brittany’s freedom, if not her own. So she offers her hand secretly to Emperor Maximilien of Austria, a ruler strong enough to stand against France.
Meanwhile, the equally wily Marguerite, the power behind the French throne, can’t wait to get Anne safely married off to her callow brother, King Charles. There’s just one problem: Anne has distracted the French envoy with a unicorn hunt in the magical forest of Brocéliande. Every knight yearns to kill a unicorn, and a virgin is required for bait. With this diversion, Anne hopes to delay her deflowering until Maximilien arrives to save her.
The boundaries between the normal and the fantastical still exist in this version of 1490 — they’re just drawn a bit differently. These characters hear Mass and celebrate Eastertide, like real medieval nobles, but they also consult “diviners” who use magic for long-distance communication. They refer to the “Age of Enchantment” as part of their past, and the korriganed (Breton fairy folk) haven’t been sighted for centuries. Yet unicorns are known to be real, if elusive — liminal creatures with ties to the supernatural.
After a transformative encounter with a unicorn, Anne must take care to “cast her part in it in a pious light or dark rumors would spread.” But she has unwittingly brought a bit of enchantment back from Brocéliande. When Marguerite arrives in Brittany to force Anne into marriage, sorcery begins to interfere with modern statecraft in unpredictable and even terrifying ways.
From its first sentence (see sidebar excerpt), The Unicorn Hunters pulls us inexorably into the world of “wet, green, ghost-addled” 15th-century Brittany, haunted by specters and brigands. The author of the best-selling Winternight trilogy and last year’s The Warm Hands of Ghosts, Arden builds her setting with beautiful economy. The third-person narrative dances from one perspective to another, giving poetic shape to complex historical backstory. We grasp what’s at stake for Marguerite, for instance, from a single sentence: “Her father had cobbled together great pieces of bloodily acquired earth and then knitted them up strong with roads and sensible governments.”
Arden’s research shows in the novel’s wealth of details about food, dress, sleeping habits and weaponry. She integrates fantasy elements seamlessly with historical ones, then embroiders this tapestry with larger-than-life characters. Anne and her plucky younger sister, Isabeau, are deeply sympathetic figures. So is Louis of Orleans, himself an heir to the French throne, who is recruited to betray Anne but would rather champion her. Even the conniving Marguerite earns our respect as another royal woman doing her best to cling to the reins of power.
This reader’s favorite character was Elesbed, a Breton peasant girl rescued by Anne from starvation, who befriends a cat that turns out to be an adept navigator of the supernatural. In another writer’s hands, such a conceit might be twee. But Arden makes it work by preserving just enough of the alien flavor of medieval culture — for instance, Elesbed’s initial bemusement at the notion of making a working animal her pet.
In its first half, The Unicorn Hunters walks a fine line between historical intrigue and fantasy. As it progresses from the midpoint, it takes full flight into the fantasy genre, with a love story also moving to center stage. (For those who care about such things: Yes, there is “spice.”)
As a reader who was enthralled by the uncanny ambiguity of the earlier chapters, with their portrayal of a world in troubled transition from magic to science, I struggled somewhat with this shift into a more standard fantasy mode. I found myself craving the sensory and historical grounding of the novel’s opening, even as Arden constructs an evocative magic system in which a slant of light can transport someone to another plane.
While aspects of The Unicorn Hunters are likely to appeal to romantasy readers, the best parts of the novel feel more like an excavation of the genre’s origins. With her deft and deliberate use of archaisms alongside modern descriptive virtuosity, Arden casts a spell that reminded me of John Keats’ medieval throwback “The Eve of St. Agnes.” The novel charms us precisely because we’re never allowed to forget that it takes place “ages long ago” (in Keats’ phrase), in a world so distant from us that unicorns and fairies could have meddled in its affairs of state. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Medieval Mirror | Book review: The Unicorn Hunters, Katherine Arden”
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