I think I just fell off the cliff

[mmcirvin]

I'm now reading The Road to Oz, the fifth Oz book.

Kibo warned me that the Oz books suffer a serious decline in quality at some point, after which Baum is clearly just cranking the things out for the cash and not trying very hard. There are a couple of volumes yet before he switches to a yearly schedule... but I think I just hit the downslope. He's coasting at this point.

I'm almost halfway through Road. Dorothy's teamed up with some creepy old vagrant who has a Love Magnet that makes everyone love him, and an extremely stupid and annoying little kid. The Love Magnet means that none of the adventures they have could possibly be interesting unless the vagrant turns out to be evil, and that possibility is just generating an unpleasant subtext that I suspect wasn't intended.

So, by Oz standards, almost nothing has happened. They've visited a town of foxes who magically gave the kid a fox head out of mistaken generosity, and a town of donkeys who, in exactly the same manner, magically gave the vagrant a donkey head out of mistaken generosity. And now they're talking to a guy who involuntarily makes annoying music. In Wizard all this would have happened in about two pages and they'd be on to something else.

Comments

The Tin Woodman: Another View

[jwgh]

I found the following in an Amazon review of the Patchwork Girl Of Oz and thought others might be interested:

I REALLY MUST DISAGREE THAT THE TIN WOODMAN WAS SO KIND AND GENTLE THAT EVERYONE LOVED HIM (I HATE HIM MORE THAN THE DEVIL EVEN) NO ONE CANNOT PRETEND THAT HE DOESN'T HAVE A MENACING, DISCRIMINATING SIDE TO HIS PERSONALITY! HE DOES NOT REALLY HAVE A HEART! THE WIZARD WAS NOTHING MORE THAN A HUMBUG, REMEMBER! WHAT HE DOES HAVE IS A VERY POOR SUSTITUTE TO THE REAL THING! THIS IS WHAT I MEAN, IN "VISITORS FROM OZ" HE SAYS, "I COULD CHOP OFF HIS HEAD, BUT THAT WOULDN'T BE KIND. MY HEART WOULD NEVER ALLOW IT." IF HE HAD GOOD HEART HE NEVER WOULD HAVE THOUGHT OF SUCH A THING AT ALL! BETTER THAN THINK OF IT AND WANT TO BUT NOT ALLOW HIMSELF TO BECAUSE OF HIS FAKE HEART! HE IS REALLY SUPPOSED TO BE LIKE A GUARDIAN ANGEL! AND, LISTEN! THE REAL TIN WOODMAN DOES NOT THREATEN PEOPLE WITH HIS AXE! I WILL NEVER, EVER, ACCEPT ANYTHING LESS!

Re: The Tin Woodman: Another View

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Well, he has a point. Lots of the lovely features of the Ozians are what Ken "Acolyte of Jabootu" Begg would call Informed Attributes: things we're told even though depicted events actually contradict them. For instance, in The Emerald City we're told that Oz is an egalitarian communist paradise where Ozma personally ensures that all goods are distributed fairly, and nobody wants more than he needs; but there's certainly no evidence of this from the distribution of goods we can see there.

In the first book, this is done intentionally; the Tin Woodman claims to be heartless though he obviously isn't, etc. But later on I suspect it was because Baum was making stuff up as he went along.