Title The Last Unicorn Author Peter S. Beagle Cover Art Mel Grant Publisher Roc - 1991 First Printing 1968
	Title Two Hearts Author Peter S. Beagle Cover Art --- Publisher --- First Printing ---
	Title The Last Unicorn: The Lost Journey Author Peter S. Beagle Cover Art Stephanie Law Publisher Tachyon - 2018 First Printing 2007
	Title The Last Unicorn: Graphic Novel Author Peter S. Beagle Illustrator Renae De Liz & Ray Dillon Publisher IDW - 2018 First Printing IDW - 2010
	Title The Way Home Author Peter S. Beagle Cover Art Daniel Brount Publisher Ace - 2023 First Printing Ace - 2023
	Category Fantasy Warnings None Main Characters The Unicorn, Schmendrick, Molly, Prince Lir, King Haggard Main Elements Unicorns, wizards, demons Website peterbeagle.com

The Last Unicorn

Two Hearts

The Last Unicorn: The Lost Journey

The Last Unicorn: Graphic Novel

The Way Home

“No, no, listen, don't listen to me, listen. You can find your people if you are brave. They passed down all the roads ago, and the Red Bull ran close behind them and covered their footprints.”

I decided to make this reading year a unicorn themed one. How could I start other than to pick The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. I had put it off for years, I'd heard rumours it was nothing like the movie, and that movie gave me such high expectations I felt no book could meet it and I didn't want to be disappointed.

I was not disappointed.

First of all, not only is the movie faithful to the book, Beagle wrote the screenplay. In fact it is so faithful in many places they are word for word the same. In fact, the only thing that changed was that some scenes were trimmed from the book to fit into the time available for the movie, and to be fair, those were the right scenes to trim. They have purpose in the book but in the end, aren't really important. In fact, other than learning more of Schmendrick's background and his own strange cursed life, movie doesn't lose anything from the book.

And so I loved the book. Beagle's writing was beautiful and lyrical. His unicorn magical and mysterious. There is humour, but there is also a sadness. This is a tale about the loss of magic, where people can gaze upon a unicorn and see nothing more than a white mare. Where people are so desperate for another life they will chase phantoms and ghosts. Where a young maiden finally has her dreams come true, but she is no longer a maiden, no longer young and her dreams have long since died. Where a Prince wishes to be a hero for his princess, but he cannot, because that is not how the story ends. And a magician who cannot use magic, and yet can turn a unicorn into a human girl, to save her, and yet to trap her in a form she cannot bear. This is a fairy tale, but turned inside out. Where the characters are aware of the story they are living and know the parts they are expected to play, even if they wish it were otherwise. Where love must be sacrificed and a unicorn learns regret.

While it is a story of hope and love, it is also a bittersweet story of loss and and things passing. There are many layers and meanings in this book, and I'd love to see someone unravel the butterfly's ramblings, even Beagle claims he doesn't recall where all the quotes came from. And talking of quotes, every page or so there would be a line just so perfectly worded it could make you cry.

“Then what is magic for?" Prince Lír demanded wildly. "What use is wizardry if it cannot save a unicorn?"

Schmedrick did not turn his head. With a touch of sad mockery in his voice, he said, "That's what heroes are for.”

This is a story that cannot be put into words, it may never have won a literary award yet it consistently appears at the top of best fantasy books ever written. If you love unicorns, if you love fantasy, you must read this book (and watch the movie, they don't make animated films like that anymore, it was serious and beautiful, terrifying and sad, there were a few silly jokes but the artwork is just magical).

It just so happens that this is also the 50th anniversary of original publishing of the book, and so with perfect timing for my unicorn year, The Last Unicorn: The Lost Journey was published. It contains the original story Beagle started writing when he was inspired to write about a unicorn (though that was never his intent, he wanted to write a great American fiction classic...instead, unintentionally, he wrote a great fantasy classic). It starts off almost exactly the same, with a unicorn in the woods, only she meets a dragon that tells her of the loss of unicorns in the world. Again she sets off on her journey, but rather than wandering a fairy tale medieval world, she finds a modern world, with cars and asphalt paved roads. There's no red bull but there is pollution and noise. No kings and his retinue that used to ride through her woods on the hunt. Now there are businessmen and politicians. Along the way she doesn't find a bumbling wizard and a disllusioned maiden, but a demon, normally her enemy, but who is equally lost in this strange human world. We don't find out how it ends, Beagle never finished it but it was very interesting to see how the story evolved, and what Beagle had to say on how the story came to be. As Rothfuss sais in the introduction:

"It's like reading an early draft of The Lord of the Rings where Tom Bombadil shows up at Bilbo's door instead of Gandalf"

It's a little pricey for such a small book, but it's a collector's item, and with beautiful artwork by Stephanie Law. On a completely random coincidence, I had a calendar of Law's artwork hanging on my wall in 2018, I thought that was oddly fitting.

Then we move forward in time, in fact we move foward almost exactly a lifetime, in the novella Two Hearts which if you follow the link you will find free online. I don't want to say too much, other than that "happily ever after" thing most fairy tales have, isn't ever really forever. The prince and princess will grow old, one will likely die before the other leaving the other alone, but then the story never really ends. I don't know if I would recommend it to everyone, for some, the story should end where the novel ended. But if you want to know what happens next, I found it was just as beautiful and poignant as the original.

“As for you and your heart and the things you said and didn't say, she will remember them all when men are fairy tales in books written by rabbits.”

A few months later I bought a copy of the graphic novel to complete my collection (I own the movie too), though I was really excited to see yet another adaptation I found this format didn't work as well. A problem with graphic novels is that I often find them choppy, being a series of static images, they can't compete with the flow of an animated movie. And given the limited page space they have to leave out the vast majority of the text and dialog of the novel. The artwork was mostly beautiful, and I was impressed with how the unicorn literally glowed, but at times the unicorn anatomy looked a little distorted (sometimes she was fat, sometimes her leg joints weren't in quite the right place) though there were moments of absolute stunning beauty. And I think I was a little disappointed that she looked so much like the unicorn from the movie, I was hoping for a new interpretation (there is one by Jennifer L. Meyer at the end that would have been amazing). So what I ended up with was something that kind of messed with both my memories, the images were very similar to the movie, so it felt like movie stills, but the plot and dialog was taken from the book, so there are scenes in this novel that are not in the movie. This is not entirely the graphic novel's fault, I can practically recite the movie from memory I watched it so much as a kid, but that's why I would have wanted a very different looking unicorn to remind the reader that is is based on the book and not a novelization of the movie. Thus this was an interesting adaptation, I don't think I wasted my money, but I don't think it added much to the overal Last Unicorn legend, though I will highly recommend it those that have not seen the movie.

November 2024

The Way Home contains the novella Two Hearts which I enjoyed re-reading. It also included a new story called "Sooz". In Two Hearts the story ends with Molly Grue telling Sooz to whistle a special way when she turns seventeen and someone will come. Unexpectedly it isn't a unicorn, or Molly, but a sister Sooz didn't even know she had who had been taken by the Dreamies before Sooz was even born. Sooz is determined to rescue her, but the way is long and dangerous, there's even a rape which is a reminder that while The Last Unicorn was a favorite movie of mine as a kid, these were written for adults. Sooz has a lot to deal with as she wanders this strange land of the fae, between dealing with the effects of the rape, the jeering of the Dreamies, her strange companion who is searching for her Uncle Death, and wondering who she really is.

See when the fae steal a child, they replace them with another. Sooz is that replacement and here she is considering the possibility that she's just an animated log and not a person. It is a strange bit of folklore I never thought about before, for if the parents of a stolen child are to be tricked into accepting the replacement, it would need to look and act like a child and therefore have a kind of sentience of its own, even if it was just a log to start with.

The tale grows more complex as Sooz's sister may not want to leave, after all she'd been with the Dreamies for 18 years, they have become her family, and she is offered the opportunity to become immortal if she stays with them. She doesn't remember much about her human parents. And leaving the world of the fae may not be as easy as it seems, in fact it seems the land of the Dreamies is not so much a place as a state of mind you must travel to and from. It was complex, it was dark and at times disturbing, but always, always beautiful. Whenever Beagle returns to this land of unicorns and wizards there is magic in his words, you are drawn deep into it regardless if Schmendrick has his face stuck in the boobs of a tree, or a unicorn learns to regret, or a young woman is raped in search of her stolen sister. Its beautiful, and gritty, and true, and bittersweet, and a reminder that not all fairy tales end with happily ever after. Sometimes there is death, and there will alway be something you have to give up in exchange for something else, something lost that can never be regained.

If I can pick a theme that has held true in all the Beagle books I have read, it is the loss of innocence. Yes there is magic in the world, but it doesn't solve your problems, in fact it can be the source of them. The unicorn learned to regret, Lyr could not be with his love, Sooz lost her sense of who she was, Jenia gave up a chance of immortality, Michael Morgan (A Fine and Private Place) remembers how he died, Joe Farrell (The Folk of the Air) who is exposed to magic and goddesses, and then there's Molly Grue, who was all those things from the moment we first set eyes on her and yet showed us that you can still live on and seek new happiness in your life.