The Land of Oz

1904, mid-1970s Reilly & Lee edition
L. Frank Baum
Illustrated by John R. Neill
The Land of Oz
Original and purchase price unknown
Hardcover with stains
A-


While rereading this book, I kept thinking how awesome and fun it is, in a way I didn't for Wizard.  Part of it that Neill's drawings trump Denslow's, particularly in his debut.  Whether it's a picture that makes me pore over the details, as the ones involving magic do, or the action-packed sequences, like the three pictures that show what happens when the Sawhorse jumps over a river, with a silent movie feel, every illustration enhances the story.  And such a good story!  Tip is a fine hero:  mischievous but good-hearted, practical, occasionally clever, and very human.  I got this book at such a young age-- for Easter, from the aunt who'd got me Wizard the previous Christmas-- I don't know if it ever seemed weird to me that he turns into not just a girl but a princess at the end.  I think I was more confused by the changing hair color.  (Tip is brunet, Ozma has "tresses of ruddy gold," but from the third book on she's back to black hair.)


I think I missed Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion, but they came back for the next book, so that was OK.  (It would be a longer wait for Toto.)  The new characters, particularly the pedantic yet pun-obsessed Wogglebug, are worthy additions.  I always had a soft spot for the Saw-horse, because he's so down-to-earth.  And this was years before Forest Gump, but I soon learned that the Gump took its name from turn-of-the-century slang for a "foolish person."  As I mentioned in my post on Wizard, I loved how amazing Glinda is in this book.  Her Crowning Moment of Awesome is when she jumps on the Saw-horse and chases Mombi (disguised as a Griffin) to the edge of the Deadly Desert.


I suppose there's a paper to be written, if it hasn't been done already, about the nature of gender in this book, particularly with the satire of the suffragette movement, as embodied in General Jinjur and her Army of Revolt.  I never really saw the story as sexist, or anti-sexist.  When Baum is racist, it's very obvious.  But his feelings about men and women, boys and girls, are more complex.  Certainly, Mombi is one of his great villainesses, and a lot scarier than the Nome King would ever be.  (More on that later.)


As the second Oz book, this is less retconny than I expected.  Tip's version of the Wizard's balloon escape doesn't match canon, but it may be how he heard it way up in the Gillikin Country, particularly if his source was the biased Mombi.  This is pretty much Oz as we saw it four years earlier.  (Except that less time has passed in Oz than in the real world, since Dorothy definitely won't be seven years older when she returns.)  It does look different, thanks to Neill's characteristic "grinning houses."  But it's still a land where money is important and witches have a lot of power.  (Mombi is secretly breaking the law that the still nameless Good Witch of the North has passed about forbidding other witches in her region.)   Once Ozma takes the throne, things will gradually change, but we're still in old-school Oz, literally in the case of the Wogglebug.


He's H.M., Highly Magnified, permanently, after Professor Nowitall uses a magnifying-glass and projects him on a screen.  No one questions the logistics of this.  It's a less Carrollian book than Mo, but I think the part about counting to 17 by twos is worthy of Carroll, both as math and as absurdity.  The scene where Jellia Jamb, one of my favorite minor characters, "interprets" for the Scarecrow and Jack Pumpkinhead is also very absurd.  If the story is better than Alice in Wonderland, it's probably because there's more at risk here.  The lives of Tip and his friends are at stake, as is the future of Oz.  It's definitely not a dream.  And yet, there's time for wordplay and bickering and bonding and a reunion with the Queen of the Mice.  No wonder that Tip wants to stay a boy and travel with his friends.  His life as Ozma will become less adventurous.  But first, there's going to be an experiment in interventionism....