Why have I been so reluctant to review this book? Too many reasons: it is confusing, it is dense, it gets ahead of itself, encouraged by its self-importance. It's amazing in more ways than one. If I had sat down to review it after reading it for the first time, I might have given it less credit than it deserves. Or so I thought at the time.
"More than One Million Copies in Print," my paperback informs me. Although it's slightly annoying, it does serve to remind me that this book is an enduring success, and that there has to be a reason for it.
Elphaba Thropp is born into a family of well-to-do Munchkinlanders - pious Frex, adulterous Melena, and later siblings Nessarose and Shell. From the moment of her birth, she is markedly different: she has disturbingly green skin, a tendancy toward casual violence, and her first word is "horrors." However, she turns out to be rather bright and passionate, and goes to school in the prosperous Shiz. There, she meets fellow Munchkin Boq, devious headmistress Madame Morrible, and a stuck-up roommate named Galinda. As the years pass there, Elphaba focuses on the plight of the Animals, a race that is being treated as second-class citizens - and starts to bond with Galinda, who in turn becomes less obsessed about appearances and eventually embraces her own destiny. In this politically-charged and theology-ridden land of Oz, Elphaba experiences many life-changing events, many of them tragic and gut-wrenching, that lead her to become the Wicked Witch of the West ... although her wickedness, we find, is subject to debate.
To start off, Maguire could have gone down any number of roads in this reimagining of L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz; that he chose the most intriguing, thought-provoking road is to his credit. The world in which the Wicked Witch is neither a protagonist nor an antagonist is endless and filled with the details that make it seem alive, tangible. Certainly Elphaba is a character to root for, or at the very least to empathize with; her journey is gripping and full of unexpected twists (unexpected, it could be argued, to the point of unbelieveable). The way Galinda-then-Glinda is portrayed is, I find, the next-most interesting thing about the novel: as Elphaba is neither fully good nor fully bad, neither is Galinda. The sheer volume of backstory that we get, not on the characters but on the Land of Oz itself, is staggering. This, however, leads the reader to ask ...
Is it all really necessary? In the grand scheme of things, does it really add anything of importance? We see religious values in Frex and the saintly Nessarose, but ultimately they do not serve the story, or at least the story of Elphaba's destiny. We see some conversations on the natures of good and evil, offering up nearly all interpretations, but those interpretations in turn offer us nothing. The book takes an aggressively neutral stance on both issues, leaving it to the reader to decide if Elphaba is evil or just misunderstood. If written deftly, this could work; here, it was not written deftly and did not work. Nothing new is said about this age-old debate, and so I feel like I didn't learn anything of value about Elphaba or her struggles. One theme that did intrigue me was that of the Animals' struggles, which mirror that of blacks in the 1950s and gay people in recent years. Elphaba's concern about her Animal professor and "his work" is more fascinating than the half-hearted good vs. evil theme, and I wish Maguire could've fleshed that out. (Although to be fair, he might've done just that in the later sequels.)
Another thing that annoyed me was that the story of Elphaba is told through the eyes of secondary characters: her mother, then Boq for a little while, then Galinda/Glinda, then her lover (a minor character inexplicably promoted to that of secondary), and finally her lover's family. This was a dicey decision for the writer to make, because it seems only to serve to keep us at a distance from Elphaba. I cannot understand why he'd want to do that; you can't have an enigma for a main character. As the second half of the novel plunged into a state of depression, I became further disconnected with the story and began to wonder why these secondary characters mattered as narrators. And the major rewriting of the scenes concerning Dorothy put me off entirely.
The "Reader's Group Guide," an annoying addition that crops up in most books nowadays, compares this book to a "Shakespearean or Greek tragedy." Already, you know it's bogus. It goes on to ask if the book has "changed your conception of the original [story]". This is the most irritating aspect of this novel: it presumes in part that it is important enough to have an affect on the original kid's story - a story of hope, perseverance, and wonder. How could this drastically different story - as different from Wizard of Oz as
The Independence of Mary Bennett is from Pride and Prejudice - possibly change anyone's opinion about the "original"? Its goals and subject matter are too jarring; its effect is not lasting. It is a magnificent and puzzling character sketch - fascinating, dark, and full of busy nothings.
Rating: 3 Kumbric Witches out of 5.