So I ditched the Paulo Coelho’s drone of a book and am back to my love-hate relationship with Gregory Maguire. If I ever had to name one book that I didn't stand yet couldn’t stop reading, it would inevitably be “Wicked”. My first impression of the book was that that author did not have enough creative material that he had to make it an art out of extracting the magic from every last fold of the beautiful Oz, chiselling an artwork out of its hard precipitate by taking another artist’s work of art and giving it dimensions of his own. However, curiosity made me wonder how far he took it, and that’s probably what the writer depended on to give the book sales a controversial thrust, L. Frank Baum’s celebrity and the sensation “The Wizard of Oz” caused at its time. I couldn’t help noticing three things about how the book is written.
Firstly, the dimensions he set to the book, the moral, political and fictitious dimensions were not very intact. At one point, two dimensions would merge and leave out the third, and then the third would get brought up, and you could get a sense of caricaturised politics in the book. He’s misleading at that too. Gregory Maguire characterized the essence of Nazism, the ongoing controversies among beliefs, discrimination against colour and sex in a way that it is just obvious enough not to be taken too seriously, but get you just where he wants you to be for whatever plot twist he has in mind.
Secondly, he didn’t use what most writers do with protagonists. Authors tend to make you like or hate the main character, according to the plot in question, to gain the reader’s emotional stamp of approval that comes when you get to actually pin em as the “good guy” or the “bad guy” and hence overcome the moral “Spelling check”. Nevertheless, with that little side door, all he did was make you relate to Elphaba, on a more instinctively logical level. Still, I think he used the fact that she strived to defend animal rights to justify her own humanity without meaning to, and to highlight her sense of retaliating to the injustice with which she’d been treated throughout her life by the ferocity of her defence of those defenceless creatures.
Thirdly, a certain air of morbid injustice was held unwaveringly throughout the book, in a sense like the old saying: “The end justifies the means”. He pushed boundaries with his attempt to re-define good and evil. As a consequence, instead of trying to set the constant villain-hero scale, he kept the characters, especially Elphaba’s, rather volatile. Despite the fact that the book sales were elbowed into celebrity, I’d say it was its mystic cleverness that kept it going. Almost a year later and I’m nostalgic for another one of his maimed fairytales. I’m on ‘Mirror Mirror’, his alteration of Snow White And The Seven Dwarves. At the very beginning of the book, there’s a long poem, with no two lines adding up at all. I had my theories that they’re not the same person talking, even tho every line begins with I, as a sort of dream-like cloud of tags. Then throughout the book, a line of that poem starts another mini one, where, as it seems to me, he depicts every character in the book. I’m not that far into it, and I’ve always been bad with poems to be frank, but the one epitomising the dwarf grew on me, or that’s how I got it at least. The author has rather a perverse nature tho, interestingly perverse. He can sell anything to you if you’re open enough, and there’s hardly anything he hasn’t picked at more or less.
‘I’m a rock whose hands have appetites.
I’m a rock whose appetites have hands.
I’m a thing unresolved into courteous shapeliness.
I’m a creature excluded from limbo and hell,
A thing of which heaven prefers to stay well unaware.
Neither pet, nor beast of the fields, or beast of the woods,
Nor idiot kept, more or less, in the warmth of the hearth,
For the sometime amusement of humans and sarcastic angels.
Nothing exists but it rests on my, at the start,
At the end; but I keep to myself, as no one will have me.’
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