It's becoming abundantly clear that L. Frank Baum's greatest attribute was his imagination. This book is full of it, packed to the rafters with it, as Dorothy and the Wizard and their new entourage find themselves journeying through a succession of new and bizarre lands in a fresh attempt to go home. There's no shortage of imagination here and it's easy to be blinded by it. Unfortunately, I'd suggest that his weakest attribute was his actual writing talent. He's so happy whisking all these characters episodically through his vibrant imagination that he can't be bothered to ground them in any realistic way. Everything's plot conveniences and shortcuts and deus ex machinae.

For a start, to make the story happen, we have to get Dorothy Gale back to Oz, and that means yet another natural disaster. She's already been caught up in a tornado and a storm at sea. Now she's caught up by an earthquake, as she travels to Hugson's Sidings to pick up Uncle Henry from Uncle Hugson so they can go back to Kansas together. They're both back from Australia but he travelled on ahead while she spent some time with friends in San Francisco. However, when Zebediah, who's her second cousin, picks her up at the station, the ground parts right beneath them and they fall an immense distance into the world below.

At this point, the entourage is Dorothy, with her cat Eureka, and Zeb, with his horse Jim, and the buggy that Jim pulls. They all land safely in what turns out to be the land of the Mangaboos, who promptly arrest them for causing the Rain of Stones and take them to Zwig, their Sorcerer. While we wonder how unlucky Dorothy must be to have fallen foul of three separate natural disasters in quick succession, they're promptly joined by another newcomer, the Wizard of Oz, who descends in his balloon. Where Oz comes from, we have no idea, and why he arrives there, we have even less, but he and Dorothy reunite and then there were five. Clearly we aren't to ask questions. After all, why can the animals talk now? We're not in Oz. Inquiring minds want to know.

There's plenty to come that's problematic from a writer's standpoint, not least the chat to whisk Dorothy off to Oz at a crucial moment as if Baum hadn't figured out how he could possibly get her there from the Land of the Mangaboos. After all, one is on the surface of the planet, albeit in an unknown location reached only by magical convenience, but the other is underneath it. It's not as if she could catch a bus or, you know, hitch a ride on the back of an eagle or some such. But Baum freely admits in his introduction that he wrote this only because a growing number of fans wanted more. Clearly he wasn't entirely on board with the task and, with no logical way to reunite these two core cast members, he literally threw them together because he could and gave us no better explanation than that.

The positive side of the book comes in the surreal nature of the various lands they navigate their way through in a vain attempt to reach the surface. The Mangaboos are all about the same height as Dorothy and Zeb, even though they're all adults because there are no kids in this land. They're also all beautiful adults, which makes their city of glass extra-creepy, and it turns out that that's because they aren't born; they grow on trees and bushes. When the Prince decides they must be destroyed, Dorothy saves the day by plucking his replacement, the Princess, off her bush, knowing that she'll take immediate charge. This is highly imaginative stuff.

Much of what follows is highly imaginative too. From this land with its six-coloured suns to one lit naturally without any. In case you didn't know, dama-fruit, which only grows in the Valley of Voe, is the key to invisibility. Everybody eats it, because it's so delicious, and so all the People of Voe are invisible. Unfortunately so are the bears, which leads to a little chaos. Fortunately the bears don't know how to walk on water, so our heroes can escape and move on another level in this dungeon, or whatever we're going to call it. There are wooden gargoyles who take off their wings to sleep, cloud fairies, the Braided Man and even dragons... well, dragonettes.

This is all so episodic that it could carry on forever. Baum wrote fourteen 'Oz' books in total and it's fair to say that they could all have been this story overflowing into multiple books. Our heroes, as we assume them to be, wander into the land of the week with its civilisation of the week and have some sort of adventure before wrapping up there and we're on to the next episode. Sure, each of these lands of the week feature something weird and wonderful and new for us to marvel at, but even Baum's imagination flags eventually and we tire of the exercise, especially as we're clearly no nearer Oz than we were to start out. In fact, given that we started on the surface, we're worse off than when we started out.

Baum clearly thought the same thing and couldn't be bothered to figure out a clever solution to allow them to escape their endless loop of weird land after wonderful land. In the end, he cheats by telling us about an agreement Dorothy had with Ozma. The latter will look into her mirror at four in the afternoon, every day, and if Dorothy signals to her, she'll wish her to Oz just like that, using the power of the Nome King's magic belt. In other words, Dorothy had a get-out-of-jail-free card all along and either forgot to use it during all that danger or simply couldn't be bothered. I don't buy either. I buy into Baum realising he was in a complete bind and decided to cheat his way out of it.

After that, we get a tedious succession of reintroductions, as everyone we've ever met in Oz has the pleasure of reacquainting themselves with everyone else we've ever met in Oz. I hope this is a one time thing and we don't have to go through it in every book. Then again, there's already some precedent from 'Ozma of Oz', so I look forward to dismissing it all next time it happens. It feels far more like an event than a story at this point and nobody cares about anything but the majesty of it all. Maybe they didn't. These books were annual and so every one of them was a reintroduction for the kids of the day.

So, Baum's imagination, while not limitless, is vibrant and surreal and it runs roughshod over this book with the hope that we won't notice all the plot holes and conveniences that litter the lands like gopher holes on the 'Caddyshack' golf course. What's more, very little of this adds anything of substance to the series lore, which wasn't a problem in any of the three previous books. The only bit that really does has to do with the Wizard, because we learn his full name and background and find an answer to the quandary of whether Oz the person named Oz the land or vice versa. This is Baum in "I can't be bothered to write this answer individually to ten thousand fans, so I'll write it into the next book and they can read that instead."

His name is Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs. Given that his last seven initials are thrrefore PINHEAD, he stuck with the first two instead, OZ. Therefore, he was Oz before he got to Oz, but Oz was also Oz before he got there, so it's just one more in a long line of plot conveniences that Oz would land in Oz and become the Great Oz. Am I being tediously cynical about a book clearly aimed at young children? Why, yes I am, but, as John Lennon wrote it, I'm not the only one. This must have been great to five-year-olds hearing it as a bedtime story. It's not remotely as coherent or worthy to a fifty-year-old.

Let's see how next month's book fares. It's 'The Road to Oz', which does at least suggest an actual journey to get there for once. Can I hope in advance for no more natural disasters and no further use for the Nome King's magic belt? ~~ Hal C F Astell

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