(Read from The Complete Stories of Oz)
Started: December 7, 2021
Finished: December 15, 2021
(This review is written using my new format for book reviews.)
Background Information
Originally published in 1910, this is the 6th book in The Land of Oz series. At the time, L. Frank Baum intended it to be the final book in the series (but the need for money would eventually bring him back for more books.)
According to Wikipedia, "This is the first time in the Oz series that Baum made use of double plots for one of the books." (So presumably double plots will become more common in the later books? I guesss I'll see.)
My History With This Book
As I've mentioned before (HERE and HERE) this is my second attempt to read through The Complete Stories of Oz. I first picked this book up about 5 years ago, but eventually got stalled out on it before finishing it. The Emerald City of Oz was actually the book that I got stalled out on. I got about one-third into it, but never finished it.
Summary of the Book (*SPOILERS*)
As noted above, this book has a double plot. On the one hand, the book chronicles the attempts of the Nome King and his general to assemble a coalition of all the wicked creatures so that they can conquer the land of Oz.
On the other hand, the book follows the adventures of Dorothy and Aunt Em and Uncle Henry.
Aunt Em and Uncle Henry are losing their farm back in Kansas, so Ozma agrees to let Aunt Em and Uncle Henry and Dorothy all come to Oz to live forever.
Uncle Henry and Aunt Em soon get bored in the land of Oz with no work to do, so Ozma suggests a tour of Oz. Dorothy, Aunt Em, and Uncle Henry go on the tour, along with some other friends from the previous books (the Shaggy Man, Billina the hen, and the Wizard).
The encounter the usual strange and bizarre things--a town full of paper dolls, a town full of jigsaw puzzle people, a town full of talking utensils, a town full of talking bread, a town full of talking bunnies, et cetera.
Meanwhile, the Nome King and his team of wicked creatures is getting ready to invade Oz.
Ozma of Oz hasn't prepared any defenses, and, as it turns out, isn't particularly worried about the invasion. But the scarecrow remembers that there is a magic fountain that makes anyone who drinks it forget their identity. So the baddies are tricked into drinking from the fountain, and Oz is saved.
But what about future invasions? Dorothy and Ozma ask Glinda the witch to make the Land of Oz invisible, so no one can ever find it again. And then L. Frank Baum announces to his readers that because Oz is now invisible, he can no longer get reports from Dorothy about her adventures. He's sure everyone lived happily ever after, and please don't ask for any more Oz books in the future because it's invisible now kids. Okay?
The Reading Experience
Well, like I said above, I ended up stalling out on this book the first time I tried to read it 5 years ago. So I guess it obviously didn't grip me that much.
I don't know, it's not terrible. I think I was just starting to get bored by too much of the same thing by this point in the series (after attempting to read The Complete Stories of Oz straight through.)
I suppose it doesn't help that the action in this book isn't exactly gripping.
The threat of invasion in Oz is new (L. Frank Baum has not done that plot before). But it is also a distant threat. The Nome King's general is just wandering from land to land, with no hint that the invasion is going to be ready until near the end of the book. Meanwhile Dorothy, Aunt Em, and Uncle Henry are just wandering around the Land of Oz without much to do.
Evaluation
So, over the course of these 6 books, the Land of Oz has evolved from a dangerous place full of dangerous creatures to a happy utopia where nothing bad ever happens. It's been an interesting tonal switch to watch over the course of the series. I'm not exactly sure what the motivations behind this were, but I suspect that L. Frank Baum wanted to create a happy fantasy world for his child readers.
This book, even more so than its predecessors, lays out the vision of Oz as a socialist utopian land where everyone shares everything together, and no one has to work too hard. (See HERE for the complete quotation.)
But in the same book, we get to see the wicked baddies assembling outside of Oz, and so it's an interesting tonal juxtaposition. See, for example, from chapter 4:
"Oh, indeed!" exclaimed the King. Then he turned to his servants and said: "Please take General Crinkle to the torture chamber. There you will kindly slice him into thin slices. Afterward you may feed him to the seven-headed dogs.""Anything to oblige your Majesty," replied the servants, politely, and led the condemned man away.
Well, so much for the happy fantasy land story where nothing bad ever happens!
In fact, even within the land of Oz, we get to see that not everyone lives happily ever after. (Some of the talking bread creatures are eaten up by Toto the dog!)
Commonplace Book
Extended Quotation
They visited the Sugar Bunns, the Currant Bunns and the Spanish Bunns, the latter having a decidedly foreign appearance. Then they saw the French Rolls, who were very polite to them, and made a brief call upon the Parker H. Rolls, who seemed a bit proud and overbearing.
"But they're not as stuck up as the Frosted Jumbles," declared Mr. Bunn, "who are people I really can't abide. I don't like to be suspicious or talk scandal, but sometimes I think the Jumbles have too much baking powder in them."
Just then a dreadful scream was heard, and Dorothy turned hastily around to find a scene of great excitement a little way down the street. The people were crowding around Toto and throwing at him everything they could find at hand. They pelted the little dog with hard-tack, crackers, and even articles of furniture which were hard baked and heavy enough for missiles.
Toto howled a little as the assortment of bake stuff struck him; but he stood still, with head bowed and tail between his legs, until Dorothy ran up and inquired what the matter was.
"Matter!" cried a rye loafer, indignantly, "why the horrid beast has eaten three of our dear Crumpets, and is now devouring a Salt-rising Biscuit!"
"Oh, Toto! How could you?" exclaimed Dorothy, much distressed.
Toto's mouth was full of his salt-rising victim; so he only whined and wagged his tail. But Billina, who had flown to the top of a cracker house to be in a safe place, called out:
"Don't blame him, Dorothy; the Crumpets dared him to do it."
"Yes, and you pecked out the eyes of a Raisin Bunn—one of our best citizens!" shouted a bread pudding, shaking its fist at the Yellow Hen.
"What's that! What's that?" wailed Mr. Cinnamon Bunn, who had now joined them. "Oh, what a misfortune—what a terrible misfortune!"
"See here," said Dorothy, determined to defend her pets, "I think we've treated you all pretty well, seeing you're eatables, an' reg'lar food for us. I've been kind to you, and eaten your old wheelbarrows and pianos and rubbish, an' not said a word. But Toto and Billina can't be 'spected to go hungry when the town's full of good things they like to eat, 'cause they can't understand your stingy ways as I do."
"You must leave here at once!" said Mr. Bunn, sternly.
"Suppose we won't go?" asked Dorothy, who was now much provoked.
"Then," said he, "we will put you into the great ovens where we are made, and bake you."
Dorothy gazed around and saw threatening looks upon the faces of all. She had not noticed any ovens in the town, but they might be there, nevertheless, for some of the inhabitants seemed very fresh. So she decided to go, and calling to Toto and Billina to follow her she marched up the street with as much dignity as possible, considering that she was followed by the hoots and cries of the buns and biscuits and other bake stuff.
***END QUOTATION From Chapter 17*****
Connections with other Books I've Read (and Movies I've Watched)
* It's clear by this point in the series, and especially in this book, that the Land of Oz is a land where everything is alive and everything is sentient. At least in some part of Oz. The paper dolls are sentient. The utensils are sentient. The bread and crackers are sentient.
But in a world where everything is alive and can talk, do they live happily ever after? Or do they inevitably meet a tragic fate, like when some of the delicious talking bread gets eaten (see the extended quotation above.) I can't help but think of the film Sausage Party. Sausage Party is a lot darker than L. Frank Baum. And a lot more crass. But they both share essentially the same joke. The wonderful fairy-tale world, where everything is alive and everything can talk, quickly ends in disaster.
* Poor L. Frank Baum. He kept trying to end the Oz series, but the public kept insisting that he keep writing. I can't help but think of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes.
Links
* As always, I continue to enjoy the reviews of Mari Ness at Tor.com: Invading Utopia: The Emerald City of Oz
The dual plots give this book a rather schizophrenic feel, not helped by the very different tones of each. The invasion plot is as close as Baum got to pure horror in the Oz books: the Phantasms, master illusionists who revel in evil, are particularly effective.But if the Phantasms provide Baum’s most obvious and ghastly horror, some rather wretched stuff is going on in the See Oz and Eat Some of Its Inhabitants Along the Way Plot. (And I’m not just talking about Ozma finding an imminent invasion dreadfully dull.) Ozma has Dorothy visit some seemingly delightful places—a village of living paper dolls, a second village of living jigsaw puzzles—but both places are frighteningly fragile. A single sneeze from the Shaggy Man nearly topples the paper dolls. As for the jigsaw puzzles—if no one comes along to solve them, they must remain on the ground in tiny pieces, completely unable to move. (This totally freaked me out when I was a kid.)But the worst is to come after Dorothy meanders off with Toto and Billina and finds herself in Bunbury, where her two companions eat some of the inhabitants (made of bread, they are sentient and can talk.)
The Emerald City of Oz contains more material on the social organization of Oz than most of the earlier books, and as a consequence has attracted commentary on its Utopian aspects.[3] The "explicitly socialist" economy of Oz has been contrasted to other "fantasy" projections of socialist societies, like Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) and William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890). How far such analyses and comparisons should be pursued is, of course, open to debate; as Baum writes of the social structure of Oz in Chapter Three, p. 31, "I do not suppose such an arrangement would be practical with us...."[4] There are also strong similarities between The Emerald City of Oz (and to a certain extent the other Oz books) and the 1915 feminist utopia Herland (novel) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Today probably best known for The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman was, like Baum, a newspaper editor who used her publication as a platform for social reform. The literary connection between Gilman and Baum is thought to be another campaigning newspaper editor, Matilda Joslyn Gage, the women's rights activist who happened to be the mother of Baum's wife, Maud Gage Baum.[5] Sally Roesch Wagner of The Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation published The Wonderful Mother of Oz describing how Matilda Gage's feminist politics were sympathetically channeled by her son-in-law into his Oz books.[6]
* And Dane Reads Written Review:
The buddy read of the Wizard of Oz series continues! I’ve been reading them with my YouTube friend Joel Swagman, and we’ve been tackling one book every couple of weeks. The last one was a little bit of a disappointment, but I did enjoy this one some more, although it’s not quite at the heights that the earlier books in the series were able to achieve.
Odds and Ends
* Well, that's convenient! Now Dorothy and her family all live in the Land of Oz. No more contrived plots and statistically unlikely natural disasters will be needed now to get Dorothy to the land of Oz for the beginning of each new book. Now Dorothy and her family will just live their permanently. L. Frank Baum intended this to be the last book in the series, so I guess he wasn't thinking about more sequels at this point. But since we all know he eventually gave in and started writing more sequels eventually, I imagine that having Dorothy in Oz will be a convenient starting point from here on out.
* So, The Wizard has magical powers now. (He learned them from Glinda the Sorceress).
"Oh, Mr. Wizard! How did you manage to do it?" asked Dorothy."It's a trick Glinda the Sorceress taught me, and it is much better magic than I used to practise in Omaha, or when I first came to Oz," he answered. "When the Good Glinda found I was to live in the Emerald City always, she promised to help me, because she said the Wizard of Oz ought really to be a clever Wizard, and not a humbug. So we have been much together and I am learning so fast that I expect to be able to accomplish some really wonderful things in time." (From chapter 14)
This seems to me to be rather pointless. We already have plenty of magical characters in the Land of Oz. We don't need any more. The whole point of The Wizard's character was that he was an excellent trickster and an illusionist. To give him real magical powers seems to me to ruin what was unique about his character.
5 out of 10 Stars. The plot doesn't really go anywhere, but at least there are some imaginative scenes along the way.
* December 12, 2021 p.484-550
* December 19, 2021 p.550-609
Video Review (Playlist HERE)
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