Wicked by Gregory MaguireMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Wicked the Musical is one of my favorites of the genre, and I really liked Wicked the movie. I've been wanting to read the book for years, but getting it as a gift last Christmas finally presented the opportunity.
From the off, finding out it's been written a few minutes away from my house made it endearing. But once the story gets going, the world we discover has little if anything to do with the world of the aforementioned visual mediums.
Gregory Maguire admits to creating a world much darker and much grittier than the one in the musical-turned-movie, and it takes a bit to accept it. The writing is beautiful though, especially in the beginning, and the time in Shiz is, in my opinion, the most successful part of the book.
There'll be spoilers ahead, so stop reading here if you don't want them.
The weird pornographic interlude in the middle is where the book goes astray, I feel. Fiyero has a much smaller part than I thought he would, he seems to exist merely to conceive Elphaba's son because after his death or presumed death, he is invoked a number of times but he cannot be held accountable for any course of affairs.
And I do feel that the second half of the book is weaker than the first. Every time jump makes Elphaba more inconsistent with herself, her behavior more erratic, the storyline in more need of reader's suspension of disbelief. Hence, when we finally get to merge its ending with the one from The Wizard of Oz, it doesn't click in nicely, it feels forced, and Elphaba is way out of character. In that sense, the musical has done a great job in leaving an open ending. Of course, the author has the excuse of all of the open possibilities in the half-decades that we skip, but these sudden turns make the story confusing, the message harder to decipher. It's all good and swell setting out to create a world, and in terms of world-creation the book is a monumental and admirable effort, but to what end? What do we do with the world, once created?
I suppose we'll see, Wicked is, at the end of the day, the first in a series of four, and in the great tradition of the Victorian novel, the next books will be concerned with future generations.
But if I'm completely honest, for all the expectation, Wicked left me a bit deflated and at the end of it I don't feel a desire to read book 2 of the series. I feel like taking another look at The Wizard of Oz.
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