I have a rule when it comes to novels: If there’s a map of a fictional place in the front, move in the other direction. I can’t think of a book since the Lord of the Rings series that had such a map at its start and didn’t end up the worse for it.
The fact that the author took time to make up a country or a region or a continent or whatever does not impress me; it tells me he was more enamored with the creation of irrelevant details than he was with things like plot, character development, or themes. This preference for creation over craft bedevils the fantasy genre as a whole, and it’s the reason why I rarely bother to read anything from that section of the store.
Gregory Maguire’s Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
Wicked is a parallel novel, telling the “other side” of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by providing a backstory for the Wicked Witch of the West, as well as her sister, trying to make them sympathetic characters. The Wicked Witch of the West is given a name, Elphaba, which in and of itself has a mythology in the novel, and she’s a Hermione Granger sort of child, an intellectual who takes up the causes of the oppressed; she’s shunned from birth because she was born with green skin (a point which is explained later in the book in what I found to be a very unsatisfying way), and it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that until her death she has major daddy issues.
Wicked struck me wrong in multiple ways. Reusing someone else’s characters and setting is unoriginal; recasting them and altering facts or personality traits is unethical. Maguire alters entire characters and turns chunks of Baum’s original story on its head. He also clearly intended for this to be a novel of ideas – it’s a superficial one at best – and again, if you’re going to do that, make up your own universe first. Wicked‘s text also includes some awkward descriptions of sex and bodily functions, almost as if the book was written by a teenaged boy or someone who had that particular species’ fascination with those two subjects and unfamiliarity with the former. I admit that it’s not easy to write about sex – there’s an entire award devoted to the problem – but Maguire’s style is just painful, from perfunctory descriptions of the mechanics of sex to oddly jarring mentions of defecation or regurgitation.
The novel moves quickly despite some clunky prose and the aforementioned problems, because the material itself is so lightweight. I don’t mind lightweight reading if it’s entertaining and was intended to be lightweight, but Wicked is almost devoid of humor and suffers under the weight of some of its pretensions, including an explicitly stated question on the nature of evil that is only sparingly addressed. I’m tilting at a windmill given the book’s success and the way it has opened up a cottage industry for Maguire, who has since written similar books revising Snow White and Cinderella to his liking, but I’d like to see someone dump some water on Maguire before he desecrates another classic work by writing an adolescent retelling.