As the year comes to an end, I am wrapping up my personal Ozathon — there is still January to finish if you’re following the book-a-month plan, but I read the last two books in quick succession and will discuss them here.
The second-to-last entry in the series, The Magic of Oz, was perhaps the weakest premise– it’s centered around the quest to find a birthday present for Princess Ozma. Baum loved gift-giving, and at an earlier stage of life ran a general store where he improvidently insisted on carrying all sorts of impractical and extravagant items. It was the kind of place where you might find a gift for a fairy who has everything (if not really suited for inhabitants of a desolate Midwest). So this theme surely resonated for him, though it doesn’t make much of a plot device.
However, there is a startling episode where Cap’n Bill and Trot set out to find a Magic Flower as their present, and get stuck on the island where it grows. Not only can they not move, rooted to the spot, but they are starting to shrink. Is this a warning against the ills of consumerism, which is depleting our resources and threatening to destroy all of us? I do not think Baum meant it that way, but it is a disturbing example of the dangers of magic. In our time, when we can do so many amazing and truly magical things, we would do well to restrain ourselves before stepping onto a “magic island” from which we will find no escape.
Otherwise, in this book we get the Nome King trying to conquer Oz again, other wicked forces joining with him and mutually plotting to outwit each other again, and the Water of Oblivion coming to the rescue again. Baum tended to repeat himself, with variations to be sure, but here not coming up with much that was truly new and interesting.
An exception to that was the word PYRZQXGL, which if one can only find the way to pronounce it, allows one to transform into anything. I don’t know about you, but I spent quite a bit of time trying to pronounce PYRZQXGL when I was reading the books as a child — alas, without success. The importance of correct pronunciation was perhaps impressed upon me at that point, however.
A peculiarity of Oz that became even more prominent in these latter books is that though Baum keeps saying it’s an enormous land with many diverse countries within it, so many that Ozma can’t possibly keep track of them all, it’s also so small that the characters can travel to its limits within a day, or at most two. When I was a child I had a very foggy notion of how far one could walk in a day, so I didn’t pay much attention to that, but now I know it would make a pretty small country. Actually, the dimensions of Oz seem to grow or shrink according to the demands of each book and its plot; if it needs characters to wander around for days, they can do that, but if they need to get to their goal quickly, that can happen as well.
This may annoy people who seek consistency and realism in their fantasy, but if you’ve gotten this far you are not one of those people, so I’ll just leave that as an aside. The good thing is that in Glinda of Oz, Baum made a big leap from the ho-hum birthday present quest to the most important endeavor of all: keeping peace between two warring factions. In the Land of Oz, this means Ozma will have to go to them and insist SHE is the supreme ruler in the land.
I’m not sure how much Baum noticed what a bad ruler Ozma really is; she hardly leaves the Emerald City and has long let all kinds of injustices proliferate. (See my post on The Lost Princess of Oz.) But in Baum’s real-life world, which had just known the devastation of the Great War, such an intervention of magical authority from above might have seemed like the only solution to stop the madness. In any case, he keeps returning to it even after all its failures.
Leaving aside the question of Ozma’s actual effectiveness as a ruler, when Ozma and Dorothy arrive at the land of the warring Flatheads and Skeezers, they find that there can be far worse forms of government. The Flatheads, whose brains are kept in cans outside their heads, are ruled by a “Su-Dic” (Supreme Dictator). He is elected by the people, but ensures he’s perpetually in office by counting the votes himself, and keeps himself in power by stealing other people’s brains. (I will leave it to you to consider whether this still might be going on in another time and place.)
Ozma thinks since he’s so bad, his enemy, the ruler of the Skeezers, must be good, but she turns out to be a vain and cruel witch who has also stolen her magic, from the rightful rulers of the Flatheads. When Ozma and Dorothy come to her on their peace-making mission they end up being trapped underwater, and the rest of their friends (an assemblage of nearly all the main characters from the other Oz books, headed by Glinda and the Wizard) must come to their rescue.
The underwater city, like the island of the magic flower, gives another nod to the dangers of enchantment — when the ruling witch is herself incapacitated, no one else knows how to raise it to the surface. An investigation ensues, with a flavor of scientific experimentation, as the island itself is a mix of magic and technology. Baum’s magical worlds were always influenced by his fascination with the scientific advances of his day, and though they can’t be called science fiction, I imagine they had an impact on many creators of that genre.
Along with its magical-scientific-mystery plot, Glinda gives us some acerbic commentary on the ways of warring rulers, and also an entertaining fairy-tale like sequence where a young hero has to gain a magical boon from yet another witch (who is not truly evil, but likes to be left alone). And it has some of the series’ most memorable images of feminine power, as it takes all of the main female characters — Glinda, Ozma, and Dorothy — to bring about resolution, with the help of the three female Adepts who are the good rulers of the Flatheads .
After some weak and disappointing volumes in the latter part of the series, this last book has much more to recommend in it, and I am glad that Baum went out in style. At the end of this yearlong quest, I am left with a lasting impression of the inventiveness, joy of discovery, and inner moral challenge that make up the best of all fantasy. Finishing the whole series has been quite an adventure, and if you shared it in whole or in part with me, thank you! Be sure to visit my co-host Deb at The Book Stop for more Ozzy posts.