Beyond Horatio's Philosophy: The Fantasy of Peter S. Beagle. David Stevens
than she would see the king. But again Molly had an answer. She gave Sooz a tune to whistle on her seventeenth birthday, and assured her that someone would come to her. Maybe it would be the greatest magician in the world, or maybe just an old lady with a soft spot for impudent children. Maybe even a unicorn. Because beautiful things will always want to see her again, and will be listening for her. Someone will come.
They took her home, on their way to taking the king to his long home, and Molly reminded her to wait until she is seventeen. Sooz practices the music in her head every day, and even dreams it some nights, but she never whistles it aloud. She talks to Malka about their adventure, because she has to talk to someone. Promises her that on that special day in the special place she has already picked out, Malka will be there with her.
Sooz hopes it is them. A unicorn is very nice, but they are her friends. She wants to feel Molly holding her again, and hear the stories Molly didn’t have time to tell her. She wants to hear Schmendrick singing the old song again:
“Soozli, Soozli,
speaking loozli,
you disturb my oozli-goozli.
Soozli, Soozli,
would you choozli
to become my squoozli-squoozli?”
She could wait.
In “Two Hearts” Beagle gives his readers what they want, more about Schmendrick and Molly and Lír, and especially more about the unicorn. He also gives them a reiteration of some of his most important themes from the earlier work. But the writer of “Two Hearts” is almost forty years older than the writer of The Last Unicorn, and it would be strange indeed if he still saw the world the same way. Indeed, we see that Schmendrick and Molly no longer epitomize what they stated explicitly in The Last Unicorn: that we are what people think us, and we become what we pretend to be. There is no more need for pretense. In “Two Hearts” people do what they must, being who they are. The difference is significant.
It is also significant that the two hearts of the title is a pun in Beagle’s inimitable style. On one level, the two hearts are those of the griffin, the heart of a lion and the heart of an eagle. But to the reader the two hearts are those of Schmendrick and Molly Grue, beating together over the years.
Beagle’s sense of humor is not so overpowering in “Two Hearts.” There is the occasional pun, the occasional snide look back to the earlier text, and the iterated ironic song. But the main purpose here is nostalgia; the reader wants to know whatever happened to Schmendrick and Molly and Lír and the unicorn. And a secondary purpose is looking forward; Beagle sets up his sequel. On her seventeenth birthday, Sooz will whistle Molly’s tune, and someone will come. No doubt the ensuing adventure will include Schmendrick and Molly, and probably the successor to King Lír. The unicorn will figure into the climax, as she did in “Two Hearts.” And I wouldn’t bet against Sooz turning out to be the warrior queen at the center of it all.
For not only did Beagle write a short story sequel for The Last Unicorn, he has gone on record in the foreword to it in The Line Between promising a novel-length sequel. When or whether it will see the light of day remains to be seen.
A multi-issue comic book adaptation of The Last Unicorn, published by I.D.W., appeared in 2010. Adapted by Peter B. Gillis and with art by Renae De Liz, the first issue takes the unicorn through the confrontation with the butterfly while the second continues through Mommy Fortuna and her meeting with Schmendrick. The first issue contains a new Introduction by Beagle and the first part of “A Conversation With Peter S. Beagle,” originally posted on the internet. The second part appeared, naturally enough, in the second issue, and was concluded in the third. All six parts were combined in a graphic novel, published in February, 2011.
The illustrations are handsome, inspired by the animated film, perhaps, but ultimately a complete visual reimagining. They are printed with a mauve or lavender cast, which gives the art an appropriately sad nostalgia. The adaptation is straightforward, but as you might expect from the format opts for the simple rather than the complex, and thus the wonderful comic irony of the original is mostly lost. This is virtually inevitable in any adaptation, which by definition must be briefer than the original; the screenplay for the animated film suffered from the same defect, and Beagle wrote that adaptation himself. The released version of the film cut even more or Beagle’s script, as he makes clear in his narration on the Blu-Ray version released in 2011.
The animated film version, comic books, and the graphic novel are interesting in themselves, if less so than the work upon which they were based, and have served and will serve as an introduction to one of the great modern fantasy novels for a new generation of readers.
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