Spilers Within
I read a book on writing one time that advised you take a common story and make the villain the hero. My first thought was The Wicked Witch of The West, it appears that this was also Gregory Maguire’s idea. Wicked is the story of Elphaba, the cursed child of a Unionist Minister and his spoiled brat of a wife. Elphaba is born green of skin and violent of nature, biting off the finger of a careless woman who was trying to sooth the child.
Elphaba and Glinda met in college, and form a day and night kind of relationship. The Wizard of Oz is a presence of pure evil who is a Dictator in the simplest of Fascists form.
This is The Wizard of Oz written by Franz Kafka or George Orwell. The oppressed group here is the talking animals that inhabit the lands of Oz and have somehow offended the Wizard to the point that he wants them all put into concentration camps and killed. Elphaba is a freedom fighter for the poor Animals, a terrorist to the good citizens of Oz.
Wicked is a thoroughly depressing bit of business. Tick Toc machines are evil. The Wizard and his storm troopers terrorize everyone. The Land of Oz is befouled on all sides.
I have never read the original Oz books, I could never get through any of them-but I am now curious as to whether they are as horrid as Wicked-are they thinly veiled diatribes on social injustice and Fascism and the like?
But even putting aside the rants on the Oz class system, Gregory Maguire never even has the balls to tell us why The Wicked Witch of The West comes into existence as she does. We are given hints of mysterious powers at play, several players, including The Wizard are Other World beings, but nothing so simple and harmless are a conman form a sideshow.
There is a Miracle Elixer, but we are never told exactly what it is or does. There are hints that The Wizard used it to seduce Elphaba’s mother and thus the Wizard is her father. These hints were far too subtle for me to catch-I had to read the Wiki page for Wicked to find out why the Wizard is shocked at the end of the book-though there still seems to be no reason for her being green.
We are never even told that The Wizard came from our world, let alone why he is such a manifest presence of evil in Oz. Oz is nothing but a playground for Larger Powers beyond the understanding of mere mortals.
In the end Wicked is like a reading a book about Hitler in which only his life as a writer and painter are discussed in any detail-the rest of the events of his life being mere backdrop to his art.
Elphaba is not evil and not much of a witch. Wicked left so much to the imagination that I was left with no clear idea of what I had read. The countless dull and boring stories of Elphaba’s life add up to nothing.
I liked the music from the musical, but the book was just a bit baffling.
