When L. Frank Baum returned to his most famous creation for an inevitable sequel, he took an odd approach by leaving out its lead character. Dorothy does not appear in 'The Marvelous Land of Oz'. Instead he introduced a whole bunch of new characters, then had them connect with some but not all of the others from 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz', like the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman. The impression I got was that he didn't really want to write a sequel but got talked into it and so wrote a new story in the same world. Here, he clearly realised he was stuck with Oz and brought back all the characters he could to make everybody happy.

And that includes Dorothy. Uncle Henry isn't well, so she's accompanying him on a trip to Australia (the other Oz) for his health. Caught in a huge storm, Dorothy is swept into the ocean holding onto a chicken coop. She wakes up in the morning on a beach with a yellow hen who can talk. She's a girl hen but she's called Bill, so Dorothy calls her Billina instead. So much for progressive treatment of gender, something very notable in the previous book (just wait till you find out what happened to Jinjur, who had led a revolution). Then again, Billina turns out to be the most important character in the book, title notwithstanding, for reasons I won't spoil.

What's notable here is that Billina the Yellow Hen is well-enunciated but Dorothy isn't. Billina can happily say "automobiles", for instance, but Dorothy can only manage "auto'biles". For a while, it seems like 'Ozma of Oz' is sponsored by the apostrophe, with Dorothy's Kansas accent butchering word after word. Then again, she's comfor'ble enough with it, so maybe it's 'spected and she can't be 'shamed. I don't b'lieve I need to 'splain the diff'rence, but Billina does, asking Dorothy: "How is my grammar? Do I speak quite properly, in your judgment?" Ironically, Dorothy, who isn't remotely up to her standard, suggests, "Yes, you do very well, for a beginner." This is only one reason why I liked Billina a lot more than Dorothy in this book.

You might assume that, through the magical powers of plot convenience, Dorothy is back in Oz but that's not the case. After a few minor adventures, stocking up on food from lunch-box and dinner-pail trees and being cornered into some rocks by the dangerous Wheelers, creatures with wheels in place of hands and feet, they stumble upon a Mechanical Man. He's Tiktok, made of copper and powered by clockwork, and he's a wonderful new addition to the growing cast of series characters. It's Tiktok who explains that they're in the Land of Ev, which is a neighbour of Oz on the other side of the Deadly Desert.

While the political instability in Oz has been resolved, with Princess Ozma taking the throne in the previous book, Ev is in turmoil and Tiktok quickly explains why. The King of Ev, Ev-ol-do, sold his wife and ten children to the Nome King and then committed suicide by leaping into the sea, leaving the kingdom in the hands of absolutely nobody. Right now, his niece, Princess Langwidere, rules rather like a third world dictator, ignoring the country at large and using its riches for her own pleasure. She's rather like Veruca Salt, if she was the lovechild of Donald Trump and Imelda Marcos.

Well, with one key difference. She has a collection of thirty interchangeable heads that she swaps out with her own, enough that the only way her servants can recognise her is by looking for a ruby key on her left wrist. This is a wonderfully dark visual and I clearly need to follow up this book with a long overdue viewing of 'Return to Oz', the 1985 Disney feature that turns out to be a very loose adaptation of 'Ozma of Oz' with whole chunks of 'The Marvelous Land of Oz' spliced into it. It may make a lot more sense to me now than it did back in the late eighties before I'd read these books.

Given that I'm six paragraphs into this review and a whole bunch of stuff has clearly happened to Dorothy, with her new friends Billina and Tiktok, you might be wondering why it's called 'Ozma of Oz'. Well, Princess Langwidere wants Dorothy's head for her collection and Dorothy naturally has no intention of giving it up, so all our leads are promptly locked up and suddenly in need of rescue. Enter Ozma, who's heard about the fate of the King of Ev and that the kingdom needs his wife and ten children, who the Nome King has transformed into decorations, so launches a rescue mission.

She arrives on a magic carpet, not one that flies but one that rolls along the ground continuously, with whatever ought to trail behind magically shifting back to the front. And she arrives with what feels like her entire court in tow, featuring all your favourite characters who haven't shown up yet. So there's the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, the Cowardly Lion (who skipped a book but is now the vanguard of the procession, along with a new character, the Hungry Tiger) and a slew of cowardly soldiers, almost all of whom are officers commanding one lonely private. So they rescue Dorothy and her new friends and they all set off to confront the Nome King.

Not having grown up with these 'Oz' books as a child, which is clearly when they should be read for the first time, it's taken a little while to get used to Baum's style, but I'm starting to tap into what he's doing and enjoying it. These aren't nonsense books like 'Alice in Wonderland', though much of what we see is absolutely nonsense. They're not silly like 'Monty Python', though much of what we see is absolutely silly too. What he nails is whimsy, the concept that pretty much any idea is a good one as long as it's fun, even if it's silly or nonsensical, and, just like that, it's part of the fabric of Oz and just as routine as everything else. Why? Why not.

Of course, very young readers are totally fine with whimsy because that's how they live their lives until they grow up enough to learn about things like logic and consistency and the laws of physics. Now I'm in my fifties, it's harder to justify this detail given that detail and not nitpick everything to bits. What I found myself doing instead was wondering where Baum got the sparks for many of these whimsies, given that the pop culture that he grew up with is a long way from ours.

What led him to create Tiktok, for instance? Of course, 'Ozma of Oz' was first published eighty full years before steampunk got its name, but it was also thirteen years ahead of Karel Capek's play,  'R.U.R.', which gave pop culture the robot. Is he a clockwork golem? Is there something more akin to modern steampunk in Jules Verne that I haven't found yet? Talking of robots, there's a massive metal man pounding the ground outside the Nome King's home, reminding very much of a mecha Donkey Kong three quarters of a century ahead of that character's creation. Baum must be riffing on something here. And where did he get the idea for Princess Langwidere's head-swapping? That would be a field day for the action figure market, but not, of course, in 1907.

So the 'Oz' series continues to be a voyage I'm increasingly happy to be taking, even if it's perhaps half a century too late. Next up, after I catch up with that movie, 'Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz'. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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