Review of Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire

This is for my bud, Biteoftheweek. Bite has said she's evil, but I've never seen witchcraft there. The worst I've witnessed is bluntness, and, frankly, that aspect of her style is similar enough to that of people close to me that it's worth understanding. I like the adjective wicked better than I do evil. There's a word that connotes, to me, sinfulness and impertinence rather than malice: wicked ways, a wicked tongue. The word wicked suggests a more complicated place on the dour old good-n-evil axis, which, on many levels, badly needs a poke every now and then anyway. Sometimes, wicked can be wicked cool.

So you see where I'm going with this, right? Gregory Maguire's novel promised to expand on the legendary character from L. Frank Baum's (and less from Victor Fleming's) The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, presumably with the exculpatory context of the land's "punishing political climate." He seems to take some pride in his disquisition of good and evil, but is the witch bad...or is she wicked?

The story opens in oppressive economic times--drought and government expansion--but dumps the characters into a confrontation with evil of a more metaphysical sort. Maguire plays with these contrasts throughout the book, each well enough in their turn, but incongruously with one other. The middle portion of the book, surprisingly rich with political and the character development, doesn't jibe well with the magical events that bookend the witch's biography. It's difficult to resist the comparison with The Iron Dragon's Daughter, a novel which explored the dark places in storyland, and found their organic connection to the human version. Swanwick was able to find that frightening spot where the evil in our hearts is indistinguishable from the corruption of society. Maguire has them as two unrelated things, and his story is the weaker for it.

Elphaba (it works better as Elphie--the witch part gets added late) is the only character forced to embody both of these things, and it it makes her a different person in different sections. She's introduced under deep omens, born green-skinned and shark-toothed, with an innately dark and violent disposition. (She begins her life with a memorable bite!) But in the space between her first word ("horrors") and her first college roommate, the weight of the occult is lifted. Elphaba the student is an intelligent, caustic little atheist. She has no soul, she believes, but she's got character to spare, and she's got a moral sense, whether she acknowledges one or not. Even green, she's the sort of self-possessed, interesting girl that any boy who was watching wishes, later in life, that they could have possibly understood. (Yes, there are a couple of boys in the story who don't know they are in love with her.) For a while, she lives up to the appealing versions of wickedness. She rebels against the smothering and manipulative school hierarchy, becomes a subversive for the cause of oppressed peoples, takes a lover and loses him in the political turmoil created by the usurping wizard. Though Ozzie politics seems a silly notion at first, Maguire makes them real by viewing it through the small and convincing context of individual points of view. He takes ineffective missionaries, bored housewives, misfit students, horrid children and makes them all individually real enough to add up to a quality setting. There are horrors, but his people are people, and I cared about them. I'm not going to tell you it wasn't a good read.

These vignettes are Maguire's real strength, honest and convincing, but peppered in there are vague hints of greater powers and grand designs that actually diminish any transformations that come through character. You could paint Elphaba's development as a quest to find a moral center despite her atheism and despite her oddness--this is devalued if she's deprived of her will, or if she really is uniquely soulless. (There are better ways to mix determinism with character than dumping the former on the latter.) She can't avoid the events of Baum's source book any more than she can her secret mystical assignments, but the novel Wicked is hardly set up to make them look inevitable (the necessity of picking up plot coupons--bees and monkeys and shoes and so forth--got tedious by the end too). Her well-known cackling madness, quite at odds with the inwardly struggling character portrayed up to that point, is presented as an unnecessarily comical Lady MacBeth style decompression, and it's not earned. If indeed her end was imposed by greater forces, then let her exit with grace, or with tragedy, or with middle finger extended--those are things her character deserved. Maguire's wicked witch really was misunderstood. And robbed.

Review: Son of a Witch, by Gregory Maguire

On the face of it, "The Wicked Years" series, which re-examines, of all things, L. Frank Baum's Oz to uncover all sorts the bitter political tension and personal injustice lurking beneath the children's narrative, is not high on the list of books that really needed to be written. Wicked only entered my consciousness because it was ubiquitous in the airports, and little did I realize that it'd already been adapted to a popular musical, and following that, Maguire was moved to write sequels. I could have bought a Wicked tote bag with my purchase if I wanted to, and the book came with a sheet of little promotional witchy stickers. Now that I'm into the series, it means that I'm in on the whole phenomenon, and I hate that! Thanks a lot, bright.

I liked how Wicked managed to carve out a complex and sympathetic individual out of what had heretofore been a cardboard evil, and Son of a Witch performs the same feat for what had been, until then, a non-character. I don't mean to say that Liir had been overlooked by the author, but rather that he was written as a Ralph Wiggum, an unwelcome tagalong of probable-but-unsure progeny, an uncomfortable little non-sequitur, a chubby blank slate of a kid that tended to gravitate toward authority only to get ignored or abused by it. [And why "Liir"? I'm pretty sure he's Maguire's creation, and it's a name with mountains of connotation for an English-language writer, approximately none of which is yet evident.]

The bulk of the second novel has Liir, older now, struggling to fill in the body of motivations and sympathies that drives ordinary people, and to get past his own burgeoning self-contempt at this apartness. Liir witnesses state-sanctioned horrors, but nonetheless gravitates to an anonymous military career as a means to keep himself fed, and because it relieves him of choosing his own path. The atrocities that he sees--and under orders, finally commits--eventually break through his rationalizations, and the plot is pieced together from that point, but I wouldn't call it an epiphany. The compelling part about the character is that there is no moral bluster about his conversion, and there's not really any forgiveness. Liir retains much of his fundamental weakness and bitterness, but (I don't think it's spoiling the novel to say), he manages to move history forward through what would only be called strength of character by an outside observer. It's a well-handled balance, and it is satisfying that Maguire had no obligation to topple the edifice of Liir's individuality to satisfy the source material, like he did with the original witch. The world of the sequel is, on the whole, better thought-out and fit-together than in Wicked, as the best middles often are.

The blurbs spin the series as an analysis of the subtleties of good and evil. I don't think that's accurate. Elphaba (the witch) and Liir have unlovable personality faults (a simmering misanthropy in the former, an uncentered character in the latter), but their sin is dissidence and their motivations for revolt are humanitarian (or rather, Animalitarian). It's certainly not malice. The evil in the book is the official sort, popular, codified and systemic, but it is not vague. If there is difficult nuance at work here, it comes from mapping this story onto the original Oz books, and onto our lives outside of the book.

Maguire doesn't quite cross the line into political and religious satire though, even if he gets close, and the story isn't exactly a "straight" version of fantasy either, as there is some typical magic-and-wonder stuff here, and things seem to behave, at least partly, by fairyland rules. Like many a good fantasy yarn, the whole thing is set in motion by an external cross-worlds plot device that unfolds like destiny, but played out by typical human motivations. Or maybe not typically human. The characters border on the archetypical, but don't quite get there either. Our Ozians seem to be, as a rule, more articulate, intelligent and self-aware than your normal Earthling (and to be more than they imagine themselves). Letting every character be a walking info-dump, even a coy one, can be annoyingly facile, but I found that I liked it here, found it organic to Maguire's not-quite-mythical Elsewhere. Early in the book, for example, Liir has a conversation with the Scarecrow (that one), who reveals himself as a political pawn, and gives the boy some advice. The wordplay on knowledge is entertaining, and it's clear that the Scarecrow is a canny but self-deprecating fellow, whose brains, or lack thereof, are more about ignorance than anything. What little we see of Dorothy, we find her more normal by human standards, which is to say direct, insipid, and loathed.

A land like Oz (which let's not forget, was originally written as a sort of escape from midwestern life of the Populist era) is ripe for this sort revisionism--the story of such a harmonious productive land really does have a resemblance to some bullshit political propaganda. The land is a little weird. It feels a little small and underpopulated (the approximate acrage of Kansas seems about the biggest it might be) to support that combination of diversity, technology, military and economy, and no one really marvels at these malevolent, intelligent dragons, which are dispatched from the plot far too easily and anticlimactically (even if teh circumstances worked well for the characters). The landscape seems artificial and staged compared to the reality of the characters, and I want to compare it to books that explore human nature honestly, but in odd microcosm, like, as I mentioned last time, The Iron Dragon's Daughter, or John Crowley's The Deep. But for all that, the Wicked years don't quite trip over into allegory either. If anything, Maguire twists this notion just a little more, intending that our world--Dorothy's world--imitates theirs as much as the reverse, where we are the alien.

So, it's a more interesting literary niche than the embossed, cut-out covers and the popularity would have you believe, but I seem to recall a saying about that. Strong in character and an intriguing setting. I bought the third one, but discreetly. I neglected the tote bag.



[As an aside: there was a musical instrument featured that had two sets of strings, one across the other at right angles. I took it that the second set wasn't fingered or plucked (although maybe they could be struck), and was meant to resonate with notes on the normal set. I thought it was a clever idea which may actually work. I'm not sure how much just-resonating strings would add, and if the thing wasn't perfectly tuned, I think they'd sound like total ass, but still. Is the instrument completely made up?]

Review: A Lion Among Men, by Gregory Maguire

Okay, I'm getting tired of it now. If A Lion Among Men were the second book in "The Wicked Years," I would have probably liked it as much as I liked the actual second book in "The Wicked Years." It's a similar formula: take a not-terribly-sympathetic minor character and flesh him out in context. It's the Cowardly Lion's backstory this time. We saw Brrr (did Baum name him that?) in a couple of brief cameos in Wicked, and now it's an illumination of the life lived in between being a motherless cub and a surprised, chucked-aside adult member of the Dorothy team, as well as some events after. More engagingly, Maguire also fleshes out several of the bizarre bit players that have been circling the margins of the story till now.

And really, more of this and less of that, please. It starts off well, with a heretofore rare Yackle point of view, a scene from the scarred eyes of the old bat that's been pestering the characters with prophetic catcalls for a couple of books now. She demands her fellow nuns to lower her into the crypt, to hasten the end of the burden of her life and sweep her out after a year. The suicide is a near-comical, near-chilling failure. Deliciously macabre, ("wicked"), which is not my go-to place for entertainment, but a hell of an entrance in this case. The other secondary characters are almost this good too, but soon enough we're with the Lion again, and his personal history gets the, um, Lion's share of print. Some new folds in the character are revealed, and it wasn't badly done, but it more colored in the outline of his character than expanded it. And it costs us readers 200 pages of retreading old backstory, even while the author is telegraphing a larger plot and doing nothing about it. Now that these Oz books are a committed series instead of an entertainingly revisionist standalone, now that it's a story arc in other words, there's an entirely different pacing at play. Or maybe it was all fine, and it was just too soon to get back in.

The history of the Cowardly Cub picks up after his escape from the University lab, and he finds himself in the wilderness, subsisting without meat, and, Frankenstein-like, without language. He picks up the art of words by spying on humans, and boy, he's quick with that. The author isn't about to let inexperience get in the way of a few good puns or a little witty banter. Like Shelley's creature, or like old Quasimodo, the young Lion craves acceptance, and commits love straightaway, which, due to his disconnectedness from the world, has brutish results. Neither does he fit in with Oz's disenfranchised talking Animals, and his life flits between the spheres, from an uncomfortable society Animal, to an uncomfortable outcast. Poor Brrr isn't quite as likable as he might be. He has a tendency for vanity, self-absorption and conflict-avoidance, but it's clear they'd have only ever been venial sins were he not pushed around by circumstances. The tragedies aren't so much that people suffer for his failures to act, but rather that he keeps ending up in situations where his inaction matters. A hard thing to illustrate.

Maguire, incidentally, is as breezy with his allusions as he is with the language (as he is with his pocket philosophizing, his character development, his geography, his law, economy, and politics), and let's not forget the essential silliness of the setting either. It's his talent as a writer to balance that playfulness elegantly with outsized, but sneakily substantial, seriousness. I was on about it last time, but it's probably why he's so busy reinventing these classic and fairytale settings.

I don't know that any of his character arcs have been fully redemptive, but I'll go as far as to spoil you this: the ending of this one, however mild a poke to the implacable machinery of history and chance it may have been, is genuinely uplifting and satisfying. I felt good when I finished reading it--not all I want out of literature, but a hell of a nice thing.