Return to Oz: The Sea Fairies by L. Frank Baum

Two more Unreality reviews in the past couple days: the eighth Doctor begins fighting the Time War, and the tenth Doctor and Rose make their glorious comeback.

Trade paperback, 240 pages
Published 1998 (originally 1911)
Acquired and read February 2017

The Sea Fairies by L. Frank Baum
illustrated by John R. Neill

I’ve been reading a blog called Burzee of late, which is about a pair of Oz fans working their way through the canonical Oz works, plus related stories. Thus far, every novel they’ve done has been one I’ve read before, but when they hit the two Trot and Cap’n Bill books that L. Frank Baum wrote during the Great Hiatus between Emerald City and Patchwork Girl, I decided to read along with them, as I’d never read them before. So the commentary that follows is mostly a response to Sarah and Nick’s commentary at Burzee.

I’m not even sure I knew The Sea Fairies existed when I was a kid; while I owned some of the other Baum fantasies that tied into Oz, like Queen Zixi of Ix and Dot and Tot of Merryland, I kind of remember being perplexed as how Trot and Cap’n Bill knew Button Bright already in The Scarecrow of Oz, which would seem to indicate I wasn’t even aware of a book that would plug the gap.

I didn’t like this very much. It wasn’t terrible, but I did find it dead boring. I have a friend who really likes children’s fantasy but can’t get into the Oz novels because they’re so plotless—so many of them are about getting from point A to point B, with just a series of visits in between, like Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, The Road to Oz, and so on. This doesn’t bother me if the places are interesting and there’s some kind of urgency to the quest (I like Dorothy and the Wizard a lot, Road less so), but Sea Fairies is like one of those novels except no one is going from anywhere to anywhere! There’s no goal or purpose to anything that happens in the first half of the novel, it’s just a travelogue without the actual travel. Sarah and Nick connect it to The Twinkle Tales, a series of short fantasies for younger readers, but I found that pretty hit-or-miss, which I guess corresponds to my reaction to this book. Nick says the book eventually clicked for him… but it never did for me! (I guess there were some good bad puns, though.)

The arrival of a villain in the character of Zog halfway through wasn’t a “merciful release” for me as it was for Nick, though, because by the time the plot turned up, I was so disinterested that I didn’t care what evil he did. And the powers of the mermaids are so amazing and absolute that it’s hard to feel like anyone is ever actually in real danger.

I did like Trot and Can’n Bill more than Nick and Sarah did—they both have a nice practicality to them. Bill sort of veers between out of his depth (heh) to the only person on top of things, but I guess it depends on how closely he can connect his fairyland experiences to a real world one. (He does a pretty good job leading the troops in Sky Island, I feel.) Having an adult along is interesting, and something Baum didn’t do a whole lot: the Wizard in Dorothy and the Wizard and the Shaggy Man in Road, and Rinkitink in, well Rinkitink in Oz seem to be principle ones.

My Dover edition’s illustrations aren’t very high-quality reproductions, and it omits the color plates, sadly. I don’t think there’s a reprint that has them. As a result, the illustrations didn’t make much of an impact on me. I’m glad I read this at last, but I have to agree that it’s hard to imagine giving this to a kid now. I was starting to wonder if Baum was a terrible writer, and I only liked his other books because I was nostalgic for them! Thankfully Sky Island was much much better.

Sarah connects Sea Fairies to Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies, and I did too, but in the context of the 1978 film, which maybe gives an indication of what a 1980s adaptation of The Sea Fairies (which was supposedly planned) would have been like. Having seen the film I can easily imagine an adaptation of Sea Fairies in the vein of The Water Babies, which features Jon Pertwee as a singing Scottish cartoon lobster. (Actually, there are some elements of The Water Babies film that are closer to Baum’s novel than Kingsley’s!)

Next Week: Trot and Cap’n Bill return, but this time go up instead of down, to Sky Island!