The Enchanted Island of Yew by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by George O'Connor
By the time my three-year-old and I had finished Grampa in Oz, our copy of The Lost King of Oz was still a few days away, so I pulled out my four remaining non-Oz fantasies by Baum and asked him which one he wanted to read, and he picked this one, and we made our way through it while we waited.
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| Originally published: 1903 Acquired: ??? Read aloud: July 2022 |
Yew was added to the map of the countries near Oz by the International Wizard of Oz Club, but my memory of the book was that Baum made no explicit connection between it and his other fantasy milieu; no one from Yew, for example, attends Ozma's birthday party in The Road to Oz. But my memory was wrong. The book uses ryls and knooks, immortal forest creatures that Baum most prominently used in The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, and the book even indirectly mentions Santa Claus when a fairy says that only one mortal has ever been made into an immortal. So it connects to Life and Adventures at least, and Baum made explicit links between that and his Oz mythos.
(I wonder if it was a fortuitous coincidence or a purposeful reference, that in this book, a fairy cannot be turned invisible by a magic mirror, and that in Lost Princess, the Wizard says fairies cannot be turned invisible against their wills. On the other hand, it was jarring to read this book's statement that humans can't be turned into fairies right after Grampa, where a human is transformed into a flower fairy.)
Anyway, this is about a fairy who requests that a mortal girl transform her into a mortal boy for one year so that she can go on adventures. If it wasn't for the fact that it was written and published after Wonderful Wizard, it would read like a dry run for it: Yew is segmented into five countries, one for each compass point with one in the center. "Prince Marvel" even meets an ordinary man who rules by pretending to be a wizard. But what worked in Wizard seemed to me less effective here. Dorothy's adventures in Wonderful Wizard are strung together by her wanting to get home, and Baum's better Oz books have a similar thread holding them together. Prince Marvel goes some interesting places—I liked King Terribus of Spor, and the Hidden Kingdom of Twi, where everything exists twice over, is surely one of his best executed magical communities—but his motivation is to just... have adventures. As a character, Marvel falls flat. You could do something interesting with the idea of an immortal fairy having to learn how to cope as a mere mortal, but in fact, Marvel only solves two problems without drawing on fairy powers. Throughout the rest of the book, he casts spells, or calls on ryls and knooks and goblins for assistance, or depends on his fairy immunity to others' magic, which seems to undermine the whole idea of the book.
I also felt like Baum was making this up as he went along, and his pacing rather got away from him. The book has twenty-seven chapters, and by the end of the nineteenth, Prince Marvel has got out of the second of Yew's five countries, meaning the last three countries must be covered in just eight chapters! So the book's problems get easier to solve, instead of harder, and Marvel amasses a large group of travelers around himself, most of whom do nothing.
Like Rinkitink (which was originally drafted around this time, too), you can also see the Baum's tone is different here than he would later adopt in the Oz books. There's a lot more physical jeopardy than in the Oz novels, but more than that, even the hero goes around threatening to hang and flog people! When Prince Marvel defeats a band of thieves, he even has them up in nooses, ready to hang, before they convince him to change his mind, and later on, he really does flog the imposter sorcerer Kwytoffle. (It's weirdly harsh compared to how the Wizard was treated in Wonderful Wizard for doing the exact same thing!) Some of it I edited out, but thankfully my son just doesn't really know what "hanging" or "flogging" mean. Indeed, he reacted more strongly to the idea that Kwytoffle might turn our heroes into grasshoppers and June-bugs! I also had to edit out some racism around a "blackamoor" that Marvel wrestles.
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| detail of the Oz Club map showing Yew in relation to Oz |
I also really liked Nerle, Marvel's squire, the son of a baron who has been so accustomed to his every desire being fulfilled, that his greatest joy is in suffering and deprivation. It's a shame that these two characters don't inhabit a stronger novel, but they definitely enlivened this one. And reading the blustering Kwytoffle's dialogue aloud was pretty enjoyable.
Like I said, Baum never referred to Yew in his Oz works, and to my knowledge, neither did any of the other "Famous Forty" authors. This is probably because of the coda, which establishes that a hundred years after the time of the novel, Yew had been civilized, and thus was no longer a place of magic. This isn't really consistent with what emerged in the later Oz novels, that Oz was part of a larger collection of magic lands, but it is consistent with how Oz is presented in Wonderful Wizard and Marvelous Land, as a place quite close to the United States (hidden in the American West somewhere?) that is magical because it hasn't been "civilized" yet.
My edition is a Books of Wonder one from the 1990s. The book was originally published with illustrations and color plates by the highly regarded Fanny Cory, but these would have been uneconomic for Books of Wonder to reproduce, so the book was reillustrated by George O'Connor. They're perfectly fine illustrations, but nothing very memorable. However, he went on to be a New York Times–bestselling, award-winning illustrator of picture books and YA graphic novels a decade later. His Wikipedia page doesn't even mention Enchanted Island, which I think was his first published work.
Next up in sequence: The Lost King of Oz
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