| Date: 14 April 2011, 02:18
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L. Frank Baum was absolutely fascinated by (and exemplary of) Yankee ingenuity, and that's part of what made Gregory Maguire such a perfect heir to Baum in WICKED, his 1995 dark revisioning of THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ. One of the greatest pleasures of Maguire's novel was to see how Baum's fantasy world of Oz might look from a more sober adult perspective, and though Maguire's own fantasy of what Oz might be ultimately superseded Baum's (which is appropriate, given that both books are about repeated regime changes), Maguire's dystopic fantasy was aided mightily by the efficient clockwork of Baum's plot acting as a motor propelling the events along. You knew that Elphaba would have to wind up in the Vinkus (or "Winkie Country") as the Wicked Witch of the West, and that Dorothy would come along eventually with that fateful bucket of water. (That Dorothy should show up to be merely a remorseful pawn in the extended games of manipulation waged among Elphaba, the Lady Glinda, and the Wizard was not only Maguire's grandest irony but one of the most satisfying parts of his book.) Maguire's first sequel, SON OF A WITCH, suffered greatly from the removal of this Baumian framework. The masterplot of this later work seemed based on the George W. Bush administration rather than anything dreamed up by L. Frank Baum (with Tip, Mombi, and the four-horned cow making only the briefest of appearances to remind us of Baum's own sequel to his first oz novel). Maguire's vision of sexual couplings hidden against a background of oppression and political upheaval seemed a bit adrift and unfocused, and few of the mysteries raised in Maguire's first book received any answer.
This new sequel, A LION AMONG MEN, finds Maguire on much firmer ground: we're much more firmly rooted in Baum's fantasyland, with the Cowardly Lion (glimpsed only briefly in WICKED) now taking center stage, aided by the Glass Cat, that Baumian character introduced in THE PATCHWORK GIRL OF OZ whose lazy snarkiness made it an absolute natural for inclusion in Maguire's books. Dispatched to interview Yackle, the mysterious old woman who kept appearing at different intervals in Elphaba's life, the Cowardly Lion finds her in the Cloister of St. Glinda not far from the Emerald City, and here we find answers to many of the mysteries from the first book in "The Wicked Years" series: who Yackle is, what happened to Elphaba's Grimmerie, what the inhabitants of the mysterious land of the Glikkus nestled in a far corner of Maguire's Oz are like, and (at last!) what the purpose is of the terrifying Clock of the Time Dragon that haunted the opening sections of WICKED. (We also find out why the Cowardly Lion acquired his adjectival descriptor.) Much is left open, such as the fates of Liir, the true Scarecrow, and (most maddeningly) the missing Ozma, and it's hard to see from how Maguire ends this book as to how the events of THE MAGICAL LAND OF OZ, however distorted, might later come to pass (or even how the Glass Cat will end up eventually at the home of Dr. Pipt). Equally frustrating is the fact that so much of this sequel's action is circumscribed in the Cloister and hemmed in by the Ozian civil wars started since the first book in the series. But even if this work is not quite up to the standards of WICKED, it is certainly quite a great deal stronger and more compelling than SON OF A WITCH.
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