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The Wizard of Oz
Oz #1
by L. Frank Baum
ages 12+
Del Rey, 219pp
Published: May 1983

Like most people, perhaps, I know the land of Oz from the movies rather than the books. I've had a copy of 'The Wizard of Oz' on my shelf since I was a kid but I don't remember reading it and, after a few chapters, feel pretty sure that I never did. That's because, while it follows a similar path to the 1939 movie with Judy Garland, it's different in a number of fundamental ways that took me utterly by surprise. And that's even though I knew, from trivia quizzes, that Dorothy's shoes aren't red in the book; they're silver. I did know that it began a series, but I didn't own any of the others until I picked up a set of paperbacks at Bookman's maybe a year ago.

That put me in the position where I knew the general story that I was reading before I ever read it, but it still felt very much like I was reading it for the first time, which, of course, I was. Now I know what sort of writing voice L. Frank Baum had, which is a fascinating one. He was clearly writing for a slightly younger audience than I expected, even though I knew these were kid's books, but aimed very specifically for entertainment and entertainment only. In fact, there's an introduction by the author that suggests that he loved fairy tales but hated their moralising tone. Every fairy tale had to have a message for the kids. This one doesn't. It's just as much of a fairy tale but that's all it is.

As it's going to be defined by differences between book and film, I guess I'll write this review that way. So, the first difference is the house in Kansas that Dorothy lives in with Aunt Em, Uncle Henry and, of course, her little dog Toto. We're still in Kansas, but we're nowhere near anyone else and it's a tiny farmhouse, only one room in size, with the cyclone cellar a small hole in the ground with a trapdoor over the top and a ladder leading down. More tellingly, there are no neighbours, so no dog-hating Miss Gulch on her bicycle, no Professor Marvel and absolutely nothing else.

This sparseness means that it only takes us three pages of text—there are more of illustrations in my Del Rey paperback— before the cyclone shows up and only three more before the farmhouse sets down in the land of Oz. In between, the cyclone is so devastating in its sheer power that, well, Dorothy felt like a baby rocking in a cradle, so laid down on her bed and took a nap. I wasn't much surprised by details being changed but I was rather shocked at how quickly everything happens at the beginning of the book.

And that continues. Baum introduces us to Dorothy, we blink and suddenly we're in Oz. There are Munchkins thanking her for inadvertently killing the Wicked Witch of the East, freeing them from bondage; there's the Good Witch of the North, giving Dorothy the silver slippers and suggesting a trip to the City of Emeralds (later the Emerald City) to find out if the Wizard knows how she might be able to get back to Kansas; and there's a road paved with yellow brick (never specifically named the Yellow Brick Road). Then we blink again and off she goes.

There are no songs here, of course, to slow things down, but, damn, they bulked up the movie with stuff that was never in the book. Did the purists complain? Then again, L. Frank Baum made a few Oz movies himself back in the teens and they often bore little resemblance to anything that he'd published in book form. It must be pretty hard to complain to an actual creator of a franchise that he has no idea what it's about. After all, who knows more than the creator and who has more of a moral right to mess with it?

From here, it progresses roughly as we might expect, with the party of Dorothy and Toto bulking up with the addition of a Scarecrow, a Tin Woodman and a Lion, names only subtly different from the movie. Each has the same characteristics but I found that I liked them much more in the book. The movie turned them into one-note characters, defined entirely by the one attribute they believe is missing. While they're still seeking a brain, a heart and courage respectively, they're much more fleshed out as characters in the book, with more substantial back stories and far more endearing personalities. Even scenes that are in both book and film are far deeper in the book, even though they seem to be over much quicker because Baum never stops speeding ahead.

The differences start to add up when our happy band get to Oz, because it's a very different city here. In fact, it's so bright that the Guardian of the Gates has to put sunglasses onto them all just so they don't blind themselves and, to protect against even accidental removal, he locks them in place. I can totally see why the movie didn't stick to this suggestion but I dearly wish they had. It would have been a glorious sight! Of course, they meet Oz himself, the Great Oz, Oz the Terrible, but he appears to them on successive days in a completely different form. For a fast-paced book, suddenly it's the movie that's condensing what happens down for reasons of time!

He's willing to help them, naturally, but in return for a simple favour which is not what he asks for in the movie in the slightest. There, he wants the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West, but here he wants her life. That's right, they must team up and kill the witch before he'll help. Damn, that's a tough task to stick on a young girl! Of course, she manages it anyway, and in a similar way to what we know, but that's pretty much the movie. It's not a heck of a lot of the book.

While a lot of these differences surprised me, the one that shocked me the most is just how little time the Wicked Witch of the West gets. In the movie, she's the overarching villain, pestering the cast with her ruthless flying monkeys and cackling with evil intent. A brief explanatory note about all four witches on page 14 aside, she isn't even mentioned here until page 109, she doesn't show up until page 120 and she's dead by page 135. That's not a heck of a part! What's more, while the flying monkeys do show up and do her bidding, there's a whole logic around why that constitutes another story, making them only temporary minions against their wishes and so hardly villainous.

Given how the 1939 movie is one of the most famous and most watched films in the history of the cinema, none of this really ought to count as spoilers. The same ought to apply to the book, given that it was published as long ago as May 1900, which tells me that L. Frank Baum likely wrote it in the nineteenth century rather than the twentieth. Should spoilers have expiration dates? Would it be a spoiler to tell you how Jesus ended up? Then again, that depends on the version too. Anyway, this is my first time through, so I won't continue even though there's a heck of a lot of book left to go and a lot more adventures for Dorothy that the movie script cut out.

And I enjoyed all of them. This is a highly episodic story that could have been longer or shorter and still felt very similar, but there's a map before chapter one that shows the Marvelous Land of Oz is a much bigger place than we saw in the movie. There are all sorts of fascinating names on there of lands and places and events and people and I found it fascinating that many of them actually show up in this opening book in the series. I knew about Munchkins, of course, but suddenly there are a bunch of others. The Munchkins live in the east, the Winkies in the west, the Gillikins in the north and the Quadlings in the south. Who are they?

In short, the land of Oz is a substantial one and I'm eager to explore it, something that I expected to start doing in book two. My final surprise was to find that I'd do quite a bit of that in book one. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more titles by L. Frank Baum click here

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