For what must be thirty years now, my absolute favorite book — the one I would never surrender from my library for any reason — has been Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn. I was a unicorn-enamored girl when I first read it (I used to think I was half-unicorn), which explains my early enthusiasm for it, but as I grew older and more sophisticated I only grew to appreciate the beauty of the novel in its entirety. Or maybe it was the beauty of the book that kindled my ardor for unicorns, without my realizing why. It’s become for me a kind of comfort food, the place I go when I find myself in need of emotional restoration. Not often. I’ve probably only read it twice in the past ten years. But it’s always there, in my heart, a feeling of wholeness that I can pull out and remember when I have need.

Just this week, I was filling out an introductory form for an online community, and I had to state who my two favorite book characters were. I had to think about that for a long moment, because there are just so many. How do you choose? But then, looking at the list of books I had just put down a few minutes before (also a difficult choice!), I knew the answer. Not the Unicorn, Amalthea. She is beauty and love, but not much else. No, not her, but Schmendrick. Which kind of surprised me. As a young reader, I let myself be beguiled by his ridiculous name into thinking that the character was ridiculous as well, a childish impression reinforced by the animated version of the story (an excellent adaptation, in my opinion) where a big nose and nasaly voice contribute to image of Schmendrick as a lucky fool, and little else. It’s taken me this long, thirty years of reading, to really appreciate the character and what he represents in the book. How aptly he portrays the human condition, the pure potential we each possess, trapped within a shell of mediocrity that can only be conquered by acceptance. If I had thought about the book in my twenties, I probably would have picked Lir as my favorite character, and perhaps in my fifties I will prefer (and have a greater understanding) of Molly Grue. By the time I’m 80 I may prefer the cat, or the skull. Who can say? Right now, though, it is Schmendrick who speaks to me.

A couple weeks ago, a sequel to The Last Unicorn won the 2006 Hugo award for best novellette, and I’ve just discovered that
you can read the story, Two Hearts, online at the Fantasy & Science Fiction website. It is a bittersweet read. The story itself, I mean, is bittersweet, as you might expect, but so is the fact that it simply leaves you craving more. It’s too short, by far, and while I really enjoyed the narrator of the story as a character (a young girl trying to save her village from a griffin), I feel a little cheated by the use of the first person. I always do, anymore; too often I think it is the author’s lazy way out of having to think beyond a single point of view. And while the girl’s story was good, I feel that she stands in the way of really engaging with the characters I know and love from the original; there’s too much she doesn’t understand or doesn’t hear. Ultimately, while it is a good story, I don’t understand the point of it in relation to the novel. Is it meant to be an epilogue? Is it meant to stand on its own? I don’t think it does either really well. If The Last Unicorn is comfort food, then Two Hearts is like sorbet for dessert when you really want ice cream — it tastes good on the tongue but you’re not really satisfied when you’re finished.

Okay, I apologize for the horrible simile, but I am curious as to what other people think of the story.

Mostly for my own reference, I’m putting down some (to me) significant quotes from other essays in the Lewis book.

“The Novels of Charles William”

Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find the incredible.

“On Three Ways of Writing for Children”

It is much truer to say that fairy land arouses a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth. He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanged woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted. This is a special kind of longing. The boy reading the school story of the type I have in mind desires success and is unhappy (once the book is over) because he can’t get it: the boy reading the fairy tale desires and is happy in the very fact of desiring. For his mind has not been concentrated on himself, at it often is in the more realistic story.

The dangerous fantasy is always superficially realistic. The real victim of wishful thinking does not batten on the Odessy, The Tempest, or The Worm Ouroboros: he (or she) prefers stories about millionaires, irresistible beauties, posh hotels, palm beaches and bedroom scenes — things that really might happen, that ought to happen, that would have happened if th reader had had a fair chance. For, as I say, there are two kinds of longing. The one is an akesis, a spiritual exercise, and the other is a disease.

(This idea of akesis is one that needs further looking into in relation to the value of the fantastic.)

“Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said”

The Fantastic or Mythical is a Mode available at all ages for some readers: for others, at none. AT all ages, if it is well used by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalise while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies. But at its best it can do more; it can give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of ‘commenting on life’, can add to it.

“On Science Fiction”

We must not listen to Pope’s maxim about the proper study of mankind. The proper study of man is everything. The proper study of man as artist is everything which gives a foothold to the imagination and the passions.

Stories fo the sort I am describing are like that visit to the deck. They cool us. They are as refreshing as that passage in E.M. Forster wher ethe man, looking at the monkeys, realises that most of the inhabitants of India do not care how India is governed. Hence the uneasiness which they arouse in those who, for whatever reason, whish to keep us wholly imprisoned in the immediate conflict. That perhaps is why people are so ready with the charge of ‘escape’. I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple questions, ‘What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?’ and gave the obvious answer: jailers. The charge of Fascism is, to be sure, mere mud-flinging. Fascists, as well as Communists, are jailers; both would assure us that the proper study of prisoners is prison. But there is perhaps this truth behind it: that those who brood much on the remote past or furture, or stare long at the night sky, are less likely than others to be ardent or orthodox partisans.

“…the proper study of prisoners is prison.” There are a few people of limited vision I wouldn’t mind saying that to.

If good novels are comments on life, good stories of this sort (Which are very much rarer) are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience. Hence the difficulty of discussing them at all with those who refuse to be taken out of what they call ‘real life’ — which means, perhaps, the groove through some wider area of possible experience to which our senses and our biological, social, or economic insterests usually confine — or, if taken, can see nothing outside it but aching boredom or sickening monstrosity.

It wouls seem from the reactions it produces, that the mythopoeic is rather, for good or ill, a mode of imagination which does something to us at a deep level. If some seem to go to it in almost compulsive need, others seem to be in terror of what they may meet there.

“A Reply to Professor Haldane”

I wanted to write about imaginary worlds. Now that the whole of our own planet has been explored other planets are the only place where you can put them.

“Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings”

This book is like lightning from a clear sky; as sharply different, as unpredictable in our age as Songs of Innocence were in theirs. To say that in it heroic rommance, gorgeous, eloquent, and unashamed, has suddenly returned at a period almost pathological in its anti-romanticism is inadequate. To us, who live in that odd period, the return — and the sheer relief of it — is doubtless the important thing. But in the history of Romance itself — a history which stretches back to the Odyssey and beyond — it makes not a return but an advance or revolution: the conquest of new territory.

What shows that we are reading myth, not allegory, is that there are no pointers to a specifically theological, or political, or psychological application. A myth points, for each reader, to the realm he lives in most. It is a master key; use it on what door you like.

The value of myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which as been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity’…By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves. This book applies to the treatment not only to bread or apple but to good and evil, to our endless perils, our anguish, and our joys. By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly. I do not think he could have done it any other way.

A quote from Sara Douglass in her article Creating a Fantasy World

the physical quest, the journey, should only be the physical means by which the characters confront the ‘other’ within themselves, and discover their true selves

She tosses it in as a paranthetical remark, but it’s quite true, and should be remembered.

I’ve never read Douglass, but she’s got a space on my “to sample in the near future” list.