Review: Wicked

No, not the musical.  The original book.

Plot: This is a revisiting of the Oz stories, but this time told from the point of view of Elphaba (better known to the world as the Wicked Witch of the West). To summarize (from Publisher's Weekly, courtesy of Amazon):

Born with green skin and huge teeth, like a dragon, the free-spirited Elphaba grows up to be an anti-totalitarian agitator, an animal-rights activist, a nun, a nurse who tends the dying, and, ultimately, the headstrong Wicked Witch of the West in the land of Oz. Maguire's strange and imaginative postmodernist fable uses L. Frank Baum's Wonderful Wizard of Oz as a springboard to create a tense realm inhabited by humans, talking animals (a rhino librarian, a goat physician), Munchkinlanders, dwarves and various tribes. The Wizard of Oz, emperor of this dystopian dictatorship, promotes Industrial Modern architecture and restricts animals' right to freedom of travel; his holy book is an ancient manuscript of magic that was clairvoyantly located by Madam Blavatsky 40 years earlier. Much of the narrative concerns Elphaba's troubled youth (she is raised by a giddy alcoholic mother and a hermitlike minister father who transmits to her his habits of loathing and self-hatred) and with her student years. Dorothy appears only near novel's end, as her house crash-lands on Elphaba's sister, the Wicked Witch of the East, in an accident that sets Elphaba on the trail of the girl from Kansas, as well as the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodsman and the Lion, and her fabulous new shoes. Maguire combines puckish humor and bracing pessimism in this fantastical meditation on good and evil, God and free will, which should, despite being far removed in spirit from the Baum books, captivate devotees of fantasy.

This is an interesting read, though not necessarily an enjoyable one.  It wasn't an easy read for me, either.  There were sections of the book that I was honestly just forcing myself to get through.  It's a very thick book, and could have been trimmed a bit - one of those less-is-more sort of feelings.  Some of the back story, and some of the details just seemed totally extraneous and, quite honestly, vulgar or gratuitous.  I'm not one for censorship (it's not like the book needs to be banned because of it) but at the same time, sometimes details or scenes add nothing to the plot or characters, and are just there to be there, no point to them other than to further the tense, dark, downtrodden feeling of this Oz.  Which, honestly, could have been captured without those scenes.  Those scenes just irritated me, and I had to force myself through such sections of the book. And it seemed too, that the details, even those important to the story, could have been trimmed.  A lot of the details and subplots did get tied together, albeit 250 pages later, but that didn't change that there felt like a lot of extra pages to slog through.

It also felt like Maguire couldn't decide what sort of book he wanted it to be.  It was part fantasy, part political maneuverings, and part philosophical discussion, but I'd always seen it marketed like a lighter piece of reading, a more 'traditional' fantasy sort of piece.  So, yes, I admit that did set me up for a let-down, as I certainly wasn't expecting something this dark.  The political back-and-forth dealings of Oz would put any modern day government to shame - this is not Judy Garland's Oz.  You have societal repression of certain groups of citizens deemed 'inferior,' you have class conflicts, you have politicians corrupting youth and organizing murders to further their aims - and that's just off the top of my head!  Maybe if I'd been expecting a more dystopian Oz, I would have been more prepared for the world Maguire had created.

Elphaba is a really good character, however.  I think the parts that dragged the longest were the ones that drifted away from her (like the first few chapters, which focused on her parents, neither of whom were particularly sympathetic characters).  It would have been easy to make this a lighter book and just write off Elphaba as a purely 'wicked' character.  Instead, it's a much deeper story.  A lot of Elphaba's actions show how 'treason is a matter of dates.'  Elphaba disagrees with the Wizard's rule, and tries very hard to bring about change against injustices that she sees.  She is brave, intelligent (much more so than many of her fellow characters), and a very well-rounded character.  Had she been successful in her efforts, then she might not have been seen as so Wicked.  The book makes you think too, about fate, as Elphaba tries very hard against a system that has seen her as a curse since birth (she is green, after all).  She has tried to further her causes despite setbacks and separation from her family and loved ones, and to no avail.  Yet Dorothy is plopped down in the middle of it all and things just work her way.  This makes Elphaba's story a pretty complex one emotionally, as you don't know how much to root for her, and already knowing the Oz stories, you also already know her ultimate demise.

Overall: 2.5 of 5.  It kept my interest, mostly.  I don't think it'll be a reread for me, and I'm not in a hurry to have it on my shelf, but I didn't dislike it either.  Would've liked it better without some of the extra unnecessary sexual details, and if I'd been prepared for a much darker world than the Oz I was familiar with.