REVIEW:
WICKED by Gregory Maguire
(Harper Collins, 1995)

What is evil?

The idea of evil is of no small importance to fantasy literature, much of which is based around the quest motif and what has become it's corollary in recent years, the Fight Against Evil, usually in the form of some Dark Lord or another. Tolkien popularized the craze with Sauron, the Lord of Mordor -- almost infinitely powerful, and infinitely bad. But Sauron was a remote evil, too powerful and too distant to wrap our minds around -- we never really met him, or got to know him. We certainly never understood him or his motivations, except in that dualistic, all-encompassing way -- he was bad because he was evil, and because he was in opposition to the Good guys. Q.E.D.

Tolkien was intelligent enough to understand that while that sort of ultimate evil is appropriate from a mythical/ethical/religious perspective, it is pretty unsatisfactory from a modern literary perspective. Readers need bad guys down in the trenches, bad guys with whom the good guys can duke it out, mano a mano. Bad guys who bleed when you cut them, as it were. So you have Saruman, you have Grima Wormtongue, you have a handful of named and at least minimally fleshed-out orcs -- stand-ins for the Ultimate Evil, who is far too powerful to be grubbing about with mere mortals.

But an interesting thing happens when you read about Saruman and the others -- you come to understand them. Not sympathize, not like, but understand. They are regular people, like you and me, just gone awry.

And wouldn't it be fun to get a glimpse inside of Sauron, see what made him tick and what nudged him (okay, sent him spinning wildly out of control) down the path to the place where we hear of him, to the point in space and time where he is Evil?

One has to imagine that these sorts of thoughts were running through the mind of Gregory Maguire when he sat down and conceived the premise of Wicked, subtitled "The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West." To see the story of Dorothy and her trip to Oz through the eyes of the Wicked Witch -- we've seen this kind of turnabout before, haven't we, and isn't it always great fun?

Well, no. And no.

Because Maguire approaches his retelling with such seriousness of purpose and such maturity of imagination that it is not like anything we've seen. And it sure ain't fun. Oh, in parts it's laugh out loud hilarious, but even Shakespeare knew a few jokes in a tragedy are like tenderizer on meat.

Wicked is the life story of Elphaba, later to be known as the Wicked Witch of the West, from her birth to her death (and we all know how that happens, at least you think you do, so I'm not giving anything away by stating that yes, she dies in the end.) Born a freakish green-skinned child to a religious-zealot father and a fallen society-deb mother, Elphaba nevertheless forges her own way in the world using her intelligence and determination, winning entrance to Shiz University (where her roommate is a slightly airheaded debutante named Glinda) before her life begins to spin out of control and she is caught up in events larger than herself and, ultimately, larger than she is capable of dealing with.

All of the required cast is here -- the Wizard, the above-mentioned Glinda, Elphaba's sister Nessarose (the Wicked Witch of the East), the Munchkins, Dorothy. And none are what you are expecting. In a field where "alternate histories" and "retellings" of myths, fairy tales and even simply earlier modern fantasies are common, a reader goes into this sort of work with at least an inkling of what is to come -- for example, we know Elphaba will turn out to be the misunderstood heroine, Dorothy the villain, the Wizard a meddling buffoon.

Wrong.

We know that Elphaba will be evil by the end, yes, but that we will have come to understood what brought her to that state.

Wrong again.

The genius of Maguire's work is that he never makes the easy or obvious choice. His intent was not to create opposites, or satires, of the original characters, but to make people out of them -- understandable, three dimensional, psychologically complex people who do not live in a world of black and white but in that same hazy, foggy, gray world that we ourselves inhabit. The politics of Oz are complex, sometimes brutal and sometimes ludicrous; the people of Oz, from Munchkins to Gillikans, are individuals and behave as erratically, annoyingly and heroically as any individuals.

And we do come to understand Elphaba, but she is not who you think she is, or who you think she is going to be. Because Maguire has made her a real person.

And that's what makes her fate a tragedy.

Review first published in Adventures of Sword and Sorcery magazine.