Review: Wicked by Gregory Maguire

A little backstory: I picked up Wicked because I watched ShowBusiness, a documentary which explores the backstage stories of creating original musicals, specifically Wicked, Taboo, Avenue Q, and Caroline or Change. While that documentary is a story for another day, I will say that it piqued my interest. I started listening to music from Wicked and wondering about the story in general. In school I really loved novels that explored another version of a popular story or character, particularly novels that retold fairy tales, like many of Robin McKinley's novels (Beauty, Rose Daughter). So I admit, I read about the musical version of Wicked and it sounded like everything I wanted to know about the back stories of tertiary characters from The Wizard of Oz.

My point is, I really wanted to like Wicked. I thought it would be up right up my alley, but I was seriously underwhelmed.

The text reads quickly, yet nothing happens. I found many of the characters to be one-dimensional, angsty and uninspired. There were few traces of the original characters on which they were based. The protagonist, Elphaba, the alleged "Wicked Witch of the West" emerged as a passive girl with low self esteem who maintained a sense of righteousness and individuality, but in a "rebel without a cause" sort of way. Truly, she takes up the causes of others because she doesn't actually know who she is. Maguire boiled the Wicked Witch down to misunderstood with a lifetime of misperceived intentions. She was not the cackling witch high in her tower, she is a woman who felt slighted by her family and friends for years and took out all her anger on Dorothy, who landed in the wrong hot mess.

Maguire subtitles his book "The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West" and that it is - but it no more interesting than a chronicle of any person's life and times. While Maguire fleshes out the world and tyrannical rule of Oz, he seems to lose his way. Is this a book about the background of Oz and it's characters leading up to Dorothy's arrival? If it is, why are the stories about the Tinman, Scarecrow and Lion so murky and convoluted? If this novel is truly an exploration of how a person's actions and choices can be so misconstrued, why are the links between Elphaba and the politics of Oz so lazily drawn?

Maguire goes to great lengths to create this parallel universe with University, revolution and class struggle, and places Elphaba at the center of this, yet the point is lost. Elphaba is misunderstood - she is not really wicked: she is doing her own thing. Elphaba as an individual could be interesting, but Maguire needs to dig deeper. Maguire provides events in Elphaba's life to show all the times she was misunderstood, but Maguire fails to build on that. He does add several tertiary characters and plots that sort of explain the state of Oz, which we all know from L. Frank Baum's original tale. And that is why Wicked feels so murky - Maguire creates a complex world without explaining why it matters or how the elements are connected. Furthermore, Maguire does not write a compelling enough text for the reader to do the legwork. There also are not enough details for the reader to piece together. The big reveal of why and how Elphaba came to be born green is anticlimactic. By page 300 I felt like Prince Humperdinck in The Princess Bride when the castle is under attack during the wedding "skip to the end."

- KER