The Royal Book of Oz: In which the Scarecrow goes to search for his family tree and discovers that he is the Long Lost Emperor of the Silver Island, and how he was rescued and brought back to Oz by Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion
by L. Frank Baum, enlarged and edited by Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrated by John R.
Neill
The title page of my Dover edition indicates that this book is by L. Frank Baum, just "enlarged and edited" by Ruth Plumly Thompson; this is backed up by the foreword by Baum's widow. This is all a lie; Baum left no notes on what a fifteenth Oz novel might be about. The publishers concocted this fiction—with Baum's own wife in on it—in order to ease the transition into Thompson's authorship. She would go on to write eighteen more canonical Oz novels, plus two "quasi-canonical" ones, so she actually wrote more about Oz than Baum. I'll talk more about my childhood experience of these in a future entry, as this one I actually reread a few years ago, so it's the only Thompson novel I have real concrete memories of.
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| Originally published: 1921 Acquired: December 2009 Previously read: December 2016 Read aloud: June 2022 |
So how is it when a new author takes over? Actually, the first chapter gives a very strong impression. It opens with the Woggle-Bug interrupting a party at Ozma's palace in the Emerald City, which gives Thompson an excuse to assemble many of the characters, and you can tell she's done her homework, as this chapter mentions many small details about each of the characters—details that in some cases Baum himself hadn't mentioned for a long time, and I rather suspect he had forgotten! The Woggle-Bug has often been mentioned in Baum's books, but I think this is the first one he actually had dialogue in since his introduction in Marvelous Land, and I found I had forgotten my voice for him. Thompson clearly read the entire series in preparation for taking over. (Or reread? Thompson was born in 1891, meaning she would have been just nine when Wonderful Wizard came out, right in the target age group.) Then, when the Scarecrow travels to the Munchkin Country to visit the beanpole Dorothy plucked him off, you can tell from the details Thompson mentions that she was working with the Tik-Tok end paper maps.
Like some of Baum's later books, Thompson's novel has two distinct plots in parallel. The first is about the Scarecrow's attempt to discover if he has a family tree: he slides down that beanpole to the subterranean kingdom of the Silver Islands, whose inhabitants tell him he is the reincarnation of their lost emperor.
It is astonishingly racist. Baum was sometimes inspired by real ethnic groups when creating Oz tribes, but it's textual here: the Scarecrow recognizes the Silver Islanders as looking Chinese because he's read about them in one of Dorothy's books. They are described as ugly, they all act awful, the illustrations are racial caricatures. In reading it aloud to my three-year-old son, I removed all explicit references to the Chinese, and tried to tone down some of the other rhetoric, making them into just another make-believe fairyland people. I always edit the books mildly on the fly—often for vocabulary, sometimes for continuity—but here I found myself for the first time just skipping an entire two-page section where the Scarecrow enumerated what was so disgusting about Silver Islander food. Like, he doesn't even eat, why would he care about this? I didn't remember it being so bad, but of course when you are reading aloud, you are forced to confront every single word of the text in a way that might not be true otherwise, where you can skim about. The plotline isn't particularly entertaining otherwise; I think my son had trouble following the reincarnation stuff and the political stuff. The Scarecrow doesn't do any interesting adventuring; he just complains about being emperor a lot.
This is a shame, because the other plot line is really successful in being Ozzy. Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion go to look for the Scarecrow, but thinking he went to his home in the Winkie Country, end up getting lost there. They encounter the city of Pokes, home to the Slow Pokes, where everyone moves so slowly they fall asleep all the time, and where an English knight, Sir Hokus, has been held captive since Arthur's time. Dorothy, the Cowardly Lion, and Sir Hokus move from adventure to adventure, and they make a great trio.
Thompson has a good handle on Dorothy's mix of boldness and common sense. Rereading the series, I've had the feeling that Baum didn't really like the Cowardly Lion as much as the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman, because he barely used him after the first book, unlike the others. Here, the Cowardly Lion has more to do than in the preceding thirteen novels combined, and Thompson gets his characterization note perfect. I really enjoyed Sir Hokus, the pompous, ineffectual knight who comes through when it matters. He's a fun character to read aloud, and his interplay with the Cowardly Lion is especially great. I think the trio's escape from Pokes—where they must keep singing because it's the only thing that stops the Pokes from putting them to sleep—is magnificently written stuff. This whole sideplot is really well done stuff, exactly what I want out of an Oz book... so it's a shame about the rest of it!
It's interesting to note what's different about Thompson as a writer. There are more asides to the reader, acknowledgements that you're reading a book, but like Baum occasionally did, she keeps up the fiction that she's merely reporting something that actually happened; she occasionally says things like, "Dorothy later told Ozma....", implying Ozma related the book's events to her. Suddenly both the Woggle-Bug and the Scarecrow have manservants too. Baum always liked puns, but here they come thick and fast... but for the first time, I think my son recognized one! When Sir Hokus joins Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion, this is how things go:
Dropping on his knees before the little girl, Sir Hokus took her hand. "Let me go with you on this Quest for the valiant Scarecrow. Let me be your good Knight!" he begged eagerly.
"Good night," coughed the Cowardly Lion, who, to tell the truth, was feeling a bit jealous.
When I read that bit, my son was like, "!?," clearly recognizing that something was up, but not exactly what, and I explained as best I could, how there were two kinds of "(k)night." He'd better get used to the puns!
There is a Books of Wonder facsimile of this, but I already owned a Dover, and it's good enough to mean that upgrading isn't really warranted. It's a trade paperback, and a slightly smaller size, but it does have all the color plates, though they're collected in the middle of the book, not positioned throughout the text.
I pulled out a map of Oz to let us trace the Scarecrow's journey, and this inspired him to make another map. In this case, he forced my wife to draw this map, which I think turned out pretty good!
The plan, I think, is for this to be the map that appears in the end papers of [His Name] in Oz.
In the Tik-Tok maps, which my wife used as a model, west is on the right and east is on the left. By all accounts, this is how Baum envisioned Oz for whatever reason, so it is accurate... but as someone who grew up on the "corrected" map produced by the International Wizard of Oz Club (it was included in every Del Rey Oz book), it always looks wrong to me regardless. That's not where the Winkie Country goes!
Next up in sequence: The Magical Monarch of Mo
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