Mirror, Mirror in My Hand: Off the Wish List

                      Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle

“During the first forty years of his career Beagle wrote a small handful, scarcely a dozen, short stories. Classics like 'Come Lady Death,' 'Lila and the Werewolf,' 'Julie's Unicorn,' 'Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros,' and the tales that make up Giant Bones. And then, starting just five years ago, he turned his attention to short fiction in earnest, and produced a stunning array of new stories including the Hugo and Nebula Award winning follow up to The Last Unicorn, 'Two Hearts.'

“Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle collects the very best of these stories, over 200,000 words worth, ranging across 45 years of his career from early stories to freshly minted tales that will surprise and amaze readers.” – Amazon.

I bought this book for one reason and one reason alone: to read “Two Hearts”. Of Peter S. Beagle’s work, I remember pondering this earlier volume for a long time, then rejecting it because I felt I didn’t need the short stories, which I had read in other anthologies and didn’t particularly care for. Having read that story, perhaps I will give the others another try.

But – a return to the world of The Last Unicorn. This I felt I must have. I have a long history with that book, from reading it back in high school (or was it even earlier in middle school?) when it was already a fantasy classic, to going to see the Rankin/Bass movie which Beagle wrote the script for himself, to reading his subsequent novels to see if he ever recaptured the magic, which he never quite did to my satisfaction. I finally stopped trying and missed his last three novels (so far – he’s still alive, you know). But I had to see what he did with Schmendrick and Molly and Lir in this 2005 ‘novelette’.

And it is beautiful. A Griffin (which, as everyone knows, has two hearts, one for the eagle and one for the lion halves of its body) has been terrorizing the small town of a little nine-year-old girl named Sooz. Although the King (who is Lir) has sent many knights to slay it, none have returned from the fight. After her best friend is eaten by the Griffin, Sooz conceives the plan to go directly to the King himself. Along the way she meets Schmendrick and Molly, themselves on the way to visit Lir, and as they journey together Sooz gathers tantalizing hints about their old adventures and what they’ve been doing since. Arriving at the castle, they find Lir has grown old and sometimes vague, but still every bit a hero with a hero’s instincts for the fitness of things. He knows it must be him personally who confronts the Griffin, although they all fear it will mean his death. It is his memories of Lady Amalthea, the Last Unicorn, that steady his mind and his resolve.

This is an old man’s story, though told through the eyes of a nine-year-old. You can feel Beagle revisiting the tale from his youth, written with all the joy and strength of his early twenties, and adding another layer of wisdom and tenderness to that memory. It almost seems as if you can hear him giving himself permission to grow old and die, that death accepted as a fitting end is no defeat.

This is an excellent deluxe hardcover edition put out by Subterranean Press, with cover art by the great Michael Wm. Kaluta, edited by Jonathan Strahan, protected by a mylar cover, and actually signed: “For David – Pet[er] S. Beagle”.

Peter S. Beagle. He wrote ‘Tolkien’s Magic Ring’ for The Tolkien Reader (which I definitely read in middle school; it probably influenced me to try The Last Unicorn), co-wrote the screenplay for Bakshi’s 1978 The Lord of the Rings, and even wrote the episode ‘Sarek’ for Star Trek: The Next Generation, all significant work to my own timeline. He has also published a volume called The Last Unicorn: The Lost Journey, an incomplete first draft of the novel with his commentary and memories and tributes by other fantasy novelists, which I’ll have to investigate, and has been struggling about the rights to his works and to produce a real book-length sequel to The Last Unicorn as opposed to the coda of ‘Two Hearts’ (although, in my opinion, this story is the perfect place to leave it). He is still fighting gallantly with the Griffin of Time.