The Hungry Tiger of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrated by John R. Neill
Ruth Plumly Thompson may have recycled plots in her Oz novels, but of course she was just following in the footsteps of the master. Hungry Tiger of Oz is a lot like Cowardly Lion of Oz: the Hungry Tiger decides to eat someone so he can obtain his heart's desire, and he ends up captured by the cruel ruler of a small kingdom. Like the Cowardly Lion, he can't go through with it. And so now he must escape that kingdom, making his way back home with a small band of adventurers.
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| Originally published: 1926 Acquired: July 2022 Read aloud: August 2022 |
Much as Grampa in Oz felt like a dim reflection of Kabumpo, I found Hungry Tiger less effective than Cowardly Lion. It has its high points: the Hungry Tiger is well characterized, and Thompson gives him more to do in this book than Baum did in all of his put together. The set-up of Rash, a small country across the Deadly Desert from Oz, is a nice one: I like the idea of a villain who has so many prisoners he decides he needs to feed them to a tiger, and I think the Hungry Tiger being tempted has good potential.
It's nice to see Kaliko, the new Nome King, again, and Thompson has a good handle on his characterization. Some have complained that he's not as nice as he was in Tik-Tok... but Kaliko was only nice because he was forced to be so by the Great Jinjin, and we saw in Rinkitink what he would do if he felt he could get away with it. A Nome is a Nome (or rather, a Gnome, if you're Thompson), and if he sees a precious gem he wants, he will take it, even if it might hurt Betsy Bobbin. He's the right mix of obsequious and dastardly. (And I always like reading him out loud; my Kaliko is a slightly more sniveling version of Stephen Fry's Jeeves.) You can tell that Thompson reread Tik-Tok in preparation for writing this book: there are lots of references large and small, and she clearly also consulted its map carefully, as Ozma and Atmos even end up in the "Ripple Land" from Emerald City.
Ozma gets kidnapped here (more on that later) by a balloon man from the sky, named "Atmos Fere," and though the idea that time moves differently in the sky (two days go by very quickly) is obviously there so that the timelines sync up between the two plotlines, it's a nice trippy one. Immense City, the land of the giant Big Wigs, is probably one of Thompson's best thought-through magical communities thus far, with very Baumian problem-solving and imagery.
But... the Hungry Tiger's moral conflict doesn't really drive the story, and it doesn't pop thematically, either, as the Cowardly Lion's did in his book. Pretty quickly, the Hungry Tiger decides his conscience won't let him eat people. There's then this subplot about his shame running through the book—he doesn't want Betsy or Ozma to know he came to Rash willingly to do the eating—and it seems like this might be going somewhere... but, no, he just gets away with it! He does get humiliated when a Big Wig girl treats him as a kitten, and I think this meant to be comeuppance, but it doesn't have a thematic connection to his sin.
The book feels very aimless and jerky. The evil ruler of Rash tries to feed the rightful prince, Evered ("Reddy") to the Hungry Tiger, and his backstory is so tossed off that I think my son missed it even though it's ostensibly the plot of the novel. The Hungry Tiger, Reddy, Betsy, and Carter Green the Vegetable Man go off on a quest to find three rubies that will restore Reddy to the throne, and it's a complete coincidence that they find any of them! Parts of it read like Thompson abandoned ideas; the characters visit an underground community called "Down Town," and are on their way to another one called "Up Town"... but they just never get to Up Town for some reason. As to Down Town itself, it's ruled by a King Dad, and I didn't really get the joke. When the characters return to Rash to put Reddy on the throne, they actually only do this because they are lost, they don't go there on purpose!
Thompson has typically used Dorothy as her preexisting human Oz character (she's a co-protagonist in Royal Book, Grampa, and Lost King, three of Thompson's six preceding books), but here she uses Betsy Bobbin, who Baum introduced in Tik-Tok as a Dorothy substitute, but never gave a substantial role to again. Thompson gets Betsy's characterization pretty much spot on... but unfortunately, that's a tendency to sit there and do nothing and be swept along by events. She doesn't have the forthrightness of Dorothy or the gumption of Trot. And her best friend Hank the Mule doesn't even put in a token appearance! She never says or does anything clever or interesting. Similarly, I found Reddy a bit of a blank slate. The prince on a quest is definitely a Thompson trope, but Reddy never really has a personality, unlike Prince Pompa in Kabumpo or Prince Tatters in Grampa. Ozma is not well-done by, either; I liked her moral conflict over harming Atmos, but beyond that she demonstrates no initiative, no determination, no bravery, and no magic! This is not the fairy whose powers and morality Baum explored so well in Glinda of Oz. Carter the Vegetable Man is a fun character visually, and I love the gags about his ears of corn, but he doesn't really want or need anything; he's also just along for the ride. (He's kind of unusual, though, as a Thompson character who is enchanted but never gets disenchanted.)
Ultimately, these things add up to a book that has its moments, but is my least favorite Thompson thus far, except for Royal Book. I think my son (to whom I read it aloud, as usual) enjoyed it well enough, especially the stuff with the Big Wigs, but the Hungry Tiger's moral dilemma seemed to go over his head. Apparently he doesn't understand why it would be wrong for a tiger to eat a prisoner! Do I need to be more explicit in teaching morality to my four-year-old?
The Hungry Tiger of Oz came into the public domain in 2022, but as of July, there was not a SeaWolf Press edition of it, which is the publisher whose editions I used for the previous three Thompsons. (It came out in August, about a week too late! I only discovered it even existed when writing up this review.) So I had to switch to Del Reys. Del Rey put out mass market paperback editions of all fourteen Baum Oz books in the 1980s, and the majority of my Baum books as a kid were those editions. What I did not know at the time, and indeed, did not find out until a couple of years ago, was that Del Rey also reprinted all of Thompson's Oz novels (all of which but four were still under copyright then) in a similarly designed but slightly larger trade format.
These have the original black-and-white illustrations, but at a smaller size to fit the scale of the books. However, they don't include the color plates, not even in black and white. Things like Thompson's note to the children and the illustrations from the endpapers (a delightful one of Carter Green growing miniature Vegetable Men) are also omitted. There are also a number of typos, including a really bad one where "Oz" is rendered as "Ox" in a chapter title! But what can you do if you don't want to pay a hundred dollars for a Reilly & Lee edition? The International Wizard of Oz Club has a large stockpile of some of the Del Rey Thompsons; I signed my son up for a membership and bought this (and the next one, Gnome King) directly from them. They were both first printings from 1985! But it took an awful long time for the books to come, hence why we had to read two non-Oz books following Lost King.
Next up in sequence: The Gnome King of Oz
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