The Emerald City of Oz by L. Frank Baum
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “I will not fight—even to save my kingdom.” L. Frank Baum’s sixth Oz book, The Emerald City of Oz (1910), begins comically and suspensefully. Roquat the Red, the tyrannical, childish Nome King, is in a bad mood, nursing a grudge against Princess Ozma the ruler of Oz and Dorothy the girl of Kansas, because in the third novel, Ozma of Oz (1907), they freed the royal family of Ev whom Roquat had enslaved AND took from him the source of his magic power, his Magic Belt. Therefore, he’s resolved to surprise attack the Emerald City, pillage it, enslave all the inhabitants of the Land of Oz, and retrieve his Magic Belt. His General opposes the plan, because Oz is protected by an impassable desert, and Ozma possesses too much magic for even the 50,000 well-trained Nome soldiers to overcome. Displeased, Roquat brains his General and then promotes to General an old soldier called Guph who’s gung-ho to conquer Oz because he hates good people, detests happy people, and is opposed to anyone content and prosperous. Roquat sets a thousand miners to work tunneling beneath the desert to Oz, while Guph visits formidable peoples (“evil spirits”) to enlist their aid in the coming war: the Whimsies (endowed with powerful big bodies but embarrassingly tiny heads they hide under large false paste board heads), the Growleywogs (bellicose giants), and the Phanfasms of Phantastico (who hide their true forms and “whose chief joy” is “to destroy happiness”). Between such ominous chapters Baum weaves lighter ones showing Ozma transporting Dorothy’s beloved Uncle Henry and Aunt Em to the Emerald City’s Palace, where they ought to be happy (in Kansas they were about to lose their farm to the bank). The scenes with Henry and Em trying to get used to the finery, pomp, ceremony, and bizarre beings of the Emerald Palace are fun, but they start fretting over not having any work to do for the first time in their lives. Thus she escorts her Uncle and Aunt on a tour of Oz, accompanied by Toto, the Wooden Sawhorse, Bellina the Yellow Hen, the Wizard of Oz, the Shaggy Man, and Omby Amby (the Captain-General of Ozma’s minute army), after which Ozma should have thought of something for Uncle Henry and Aunt Em to do. The tour begins with a visit to the Royal Athletic College of Oz, where Professor Woggle-Bug T. E. has the students learning traditional subjects like arithmetic by taking sugar-coated pills, which frees them to devote all their time to practicing athletics. From there, the group visits a paper doll town, wherein a sneeze sends the denizens into disordered flight, and a jigsaw puzzle town, wherein a visit surprises the locals into scattering their body parts in small, confused pieces. They also settle an argument between a zebra and an crab as to whether there is more land or water in the world. More outre scenes and Ozites follow, featuring sentient baked goods in Bunbury, civilized rabbits in Bunnybury, people who talk too much without saying anything in Rigamarole, and people who worry about everything that might go wrong in Flutterbudget. All the while, unbeknownst to our heroine and her friends, the Nomes are coming, so the story unfolds with a charming suspense: “An unsuspected enemy is doubly dangerous.” Even when Ozma finally looks in her Magic Picture and sees the Nomes tunneling towards Oz and their demonic allies assembling, she takes no action, sanguinely saying that because her army is so small (consisting of only a handful of officers) and because there is no hope of defeating the invaders, there is no point in organizing any defense. Can even the Tin Woodman and Scarecrow reunited with Dorothy save Oz? Baum resolves the tour and invasion of Oz sub-plots with a satisfying and impressive contrivance. Perhaps to a fault Baum never met a pun he didn’t like. Almost everything the sentient utensils of Utensia say is a pun involving their shapes or functions or compositions. And the Scarecrow boasts about his farm, “The corn I grow is always husky, and I call the ears my regiments, because they have so many kernels.” There are MANY other puns, and if you dislike them, Baum’s book may irritate you. The novel has flaws or inconsistencies. Dorothy occasionally lapses into an odd dialect that may be kid English or Kansas English or both: “I can’t say ‘zactly” and “the joggerfys [geographies] will tell you…” For that matter, why can’t Toto talk in Oz when Bellina the Yellow Hen (also from Kansas) can? At times Baum’s fertile imagination escapes his sense and provides him more creatures and peoples and characters than he knows what to do with (the Shaggy Man, Omby Amby, the Cowardly Lion, and Tik-Tok don’t do much), but at the same time, his fantastic creations are usually grounded by a moral or satirical base. Indeed, each of the seemingly unrelated incidents of the tour of Oz expresses some message about life (e.g., don’t talk thoughtlessly or worry needlessly) or satirizes some aspect of human nature or civilization (e.g., universities prioritize athletics over academics, or your vision and understanding are limited by your environment). And combined all the different peoples in Oz celebrate diversity and make the reader more thoughtful. The core theme of this book concerns happiness: what it is, how to get it, how unhappy people feel about happy ones and vice versa, and so on. Uncle Henry and Aunt Em were stressed in Kansas, so Dorothy thought to make them happy by bringing them to Oz, but they can’t be comfortable there without work. The King of Bunnybury believes he’d be happier living naturally as he did before Glinda used her magic to give the rabbits their civilized city and culture, but when he begins to imagine giving up the perks of royalty (his fine suit, chair, guards, entertainers, and singers), he changes his mind. The Nomes and Phanfasms want to ruin other people’s happiness, while Ozma would be unhappy to make other people unhappy even to save her own kingdom. There is a refreshing pacifist thrust to the novel. My favorite of the several Oz books I’ve read so far is the second, The Marvelous Land of Oz, but The Emerald City of Oz has plenty of charming whimsy, pointed humor, and unexpected developments (and a great ending). View all my reviews
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