The Master Key: An Electrical Fairy Tale, Founded Upon The Mysteries Of Electricity And The Optimism Of Its Devotees. It Was Written For Boys, But Others May Read It
by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by Nick Bruel
After we finished The Lost King of Oz, my son and I once again hit a gap; our copy of The Hungry Tiger of Oz hadn't even been shipped yet. So I showed him my three remaining non-Oz fantasies by Baum, and he picked this one.
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| Originally published: 1901 Previously reread: April 2009 Read aloud: July 2022 |
Unlike all of Baum's other fantasies, this is not what Farah Mendelsohn would call a portal-quest fantasy, but an intrusion fantasy: the protagonist does not travel through a magical world, but instead, magic intrudes into our world. A boy named Rob accidentally assembles a complicated electrical circuit that strikes the "master key," summoning the Demon of Electricity, who grants him three electrical devices a week for three weeks, which he's supposed to use to reveal the powers of electricity to the world. One of them is a machine that uses electrical currents to let him fly, and so Rob makes a couple journeys around the Earth, and gets into various shenanigans and dangers.
As a result, it's Baum's only fantasy novel that actually does not link into the Oz expanded universe (though the Demon of Electricity here has some ideas in common with Electra, the maiden of electric light, in Tik-Tok of Oz). With all the other non-Oz books, I've very carefully emphasized their links to Oz, which is usually easy to do if the countries in question appear on the International Wizard of Oz Club map of the Oz continent, or if the characters have appeared in the Oz books. But here there is actually no such link.
On top of this, one of the places Rob visits is an island of cannibals off the coast of Africa. My edition is a reillustrated Books of Wonder one from the 1990s, and thus not visually offensive (Nick Bruel draws the cannibals like comedy cavemen, and gives them fair skin), but still the text is unaltered.
So I decided to solve two problems at once: I changed the island into a magical one "near Regos and Coregos in the Nonestic Ocean" (causing my son to excitedly exclaim, "I know that place!"), and the islanders into magical creatures that eat humans.
Still, this is just a small incident of a couple chapters in a much longer book, and as we were nearing its end, my son asked when Rob was going to "visit a country near Oz," and seemed unsatisfied when I pointed out he already had. I don't think he found Rob's real-world adventures very compelling: foiling monarchist plots in republican France by giving secret information to the president just isn't the thing to spark the enthusiasm of a three-year-old boy in the year 2022.
Overall, in fact, it's a pretty downbeat book, and it has the purposeless that's common in many of Baum's early non-Oz fantasies, like Enchanted Island of Yew. Rob has no real reason to go adventuring, and most of his problems are self-inflicted; a multi-chapter incident where he ended up involved in a Turk/Tatar battle in the city of Yarkand (in western China) would not have happened if he hadn't made the mistake of falling asleep in the open and consequently getting robbed.* Also like Baum's early non-Oz fantasies (Enchanted Island again, and also King Rinkitink), it's much more violent than the Oz books, with clashing armies killing one another, and I found it unpleasant.
I once wrote and presented a paper on this book, and though it's interesting in many ways, I don't think it's anywhere near as strong as the Oz books, or even as most of Baum's other fantasies, and more of it went over the head of my son than in the other Oz/Baum books we've read recently. This had me dreading the fact that when our next Oz book still hadn't arrived by the time we finished it, that we would have to read two non-Oz books in a row, but more on that next time...
I did generally like Nick Bruel's illustrations; simple stuff, but generally effective. Clear, dark lines, and a good sense of design. He dramatizes some of the more exciting moments very well.
Next up in sequence: Queen Zixi of Ix
* I did think about changing the Turks into Mudgers, and then the Tatars into some other residents of Oz, but this seemed like it might make things a bit too complicated for me to keep track of on the fly, and as if it would raise more questions than I could answer.
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