The Gnome King of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson, illustrated by John R. Neill
Since reading Kabumpo in Oz, I've felt that Thompson has a good handle on the former Nome King, Ruggedo—even if she does insist on calling him a "gnome"—and the appearance of the new Gnome King, Kaliko, in Hungry Tiger showed that she had a good handle on him, too. I've seen some complaints about how childish Ruggedo is in Thompson's portrayal, but to me that seems fairly logical. He started out a very serious, very dangerous figure in Baum's Ozma of Oz, but he was fundamentally a bully all along... just a bully with political and magical power. Take away both of those, and you're left with an impotent child. (Indeed, it occurred to me while reading that that an @realNomeKing Twitter account would make for a good Trump parody. Imagine it: "A vote for Kaliko is a vote to extinguish and eradicate your country’s mining industry. Kaliko is a corrupt politician who SOLD OUT the Nome Kingdom to OZ. Kaliko is the living embodiment of the decrepit and depraved political class that got rich bleeding the Nome Kingdom Dry!") We see this decay across the the course of Baum's Ruggedo novels: by the time of Magic of Oz, he's little more than a huckster dreaming of past glories and revenge, and Thompson just takes that a step further in Kabumpo, with Ruggedo's pathetic underground "kingdom" which consists of himself, a rabbit, and a wooden doll in a cave. Ruggedo running around in this book constantly exclaiming "I hate children!" is delightful.
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| Originally published: 1927 Acquired: July 2022 Read aloud: August 2022 |
So I was looking forward to this book. I didn't realize until reading it, though, that it also has a key role for my favorite Oz character, Scraps the Patchwork Girl. Again, she's a character that I think Thompson has done well by. Thompson likes nonsense verse, and Scraps has always been a good vehicle for that, but she also captures Scraps's impudence and skewed sense of thinking well, such as when she suggested to the Cowardly Lion that if he wanted courage inside him, he just needed to eat a courageous person. So when I saw this novel had a big role for her, I was even more excited, and indeed, it follows her for several chapters before we even get to the Gnome King.
This is the sixth Thompson novel to begin the same way: someone in a small magical country somewhere shouting at someone. In this case, it's the country of Patch, home to the Quilties who grow all the patches of Oz. When they wear out, Quilties literally fall to pieces. Don't worry, they come back together... but it takes time, and so when the Queen of Patch falls to pieces, her ministers end up impressing Scraps as the new Queen of Patch. At first she's delighted, but then she realizes that the Queen of Patch does more work than any of her subjects, including all the cooking and cleaning, and begins to plot her escape. Thompson handles Scraps perfectly; she's at first delighted to be put in such a position... until she realizes it entails responsibility!
After several chapters, we finally jump to... Philadelphia. This book's protagonist is Peter Brown, who is Thompson's first real child addition to Oz. (Cowardly Lion gave us Bobbie "Bob Up" Downs, but even though he settles in Oz at the end, he's never really seen again, and he's also narratively subordinate to Notta Bit More.) Peter is kidnapped by a balloon bird to be an "airand boy" in a balloon country (Thompson used this exact same pun in Hungry Tiger, fact fans); he escapes and lands on the island where Ozma stranded Ruggedo at the end of Kabumpo. I often feel like Thompson's novels are a bit too breakneck, but the first few chapters of Peter's adventures feel nicely methodical and Baumian: instead of plunging from place to place, Peter has to work out how to survive and how to escape. He forms an uneasy alliance with Ruggedo, clearly excited by the idea of being a general, but nervous about what Ruggedo might actually do. I like that his main motivation is to get back home in time for his team's next baseball game.
(Like Betsy and Trot, Peter knows of Oz before he arrives because he's read about it. Specifically, he's read one Oz book. But which one? He knows Ozma and Dorothy live in the Emerald City, so it's post-Emerald City, but he doesn't seem to know Scraps, so it must not have been one with a big role for her. He has read about gnomes (though not necessarily in an Oz book, I guess), but he doesn't know who Ruggedo is. He knows who the Wizard is, too. Commenters on the "Book of Common Focus" discussions archived at Pumperdink indicate this narrows the candidates down to Rinkitink, Tin Woodman, Royal Book, Cowardly Lion, and Grampa. To me, Rinkitink feels like the best fit, as it has a small-but-key role for Dorothy and the Wizard. I don't think you would finish, say, Tin Woodman and ask after Dorothy and Ozma but not the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman.)
Once Peter and Ruggedo make it to Oz, and Peter escapes from Ruggedo's company into Scraps's, the book gets a bit breakneck, but it features only two of Thompson's trademark wacky communities, a town where everyone is made of soap, and a town where everyone must sing and dance. The first I can take or leave, like a lot of the wacky Thompson communities (the image of Peter and company sailing on a giant bar of soap is pretty great, though), but Tune Town is very well done, and it ends with an absolutely divine pun from Thompson that the Patchwork Girl uses to escape.
Shortly after reading the soap chapter, my son was eating yogurt, leading to the following exchange:
SON: Is there a town in Oz where everything is yogurt?
ME: Hmmm... if there is, everyone there would be very... cultured! [much self-satisfied chuckling]
MY WIFE: You are very proud of that pun.
ME: Ruth Plumly Thompson wishes she could have come up with it! It practically writes itself!
This one has some nice side characters, too, Grumpy the Bear and Ozwold the Oztrich, and it all comes together pretty nicely when Peter's baseball skills save Oz. (Though Ozma herself comes across as pretty pathetic, as per normal for a Thompson novel.) Ruggedo is nicely threatening but also childish; the idea that he gets a cloak of invisibility and uses it to just go around the Emerald Palace pinching people and laughing at them is perfect.
Ruggedo plans to put everyone in Oz at the bottom of the Nonestic Ocean; this didn't bother my son. What did bother him is a bit where Ruggedo states that his philosophy is that if you want something, you should just take it! That he declared was not very nice. But overall, he quite enjoyed this one, though he was a bit nervous before we started reading it, due to its focus on the Gnome King, enhanced by the cover picture of him up to something malevolent by flying over the Emerald City. He's getting better and better with stories; during this one he often asked me questions that was clearly the question the story wanted him to ask, because the text itself immediately answered it.
One recurrent feature of Thompson's novels are magic workers who are largely off-screen but leave their artifacts behind for others to find, such as Wam in Cowardly Lion, Glegg in Kabumpo, and Gorba in Grampa. This book features two, actually Soob the Sorcerer and Wumbo the Wonder Worker. Soob never shows up, but we discover that Wumbo is one of many magic workers who, when Ozma banned magic, went underground in the remote Gillikin country of Zamagoochie, and have one brief chapter from his perspective. I like the idea of an enclave of secret magic workers.
We get a brief mention of Wumbo going to school to learn magic, the first time any such thing has ever been alluded to in an Oz novel—the only other magic worker's education we know anything about is the Wizard's, who was tutored by Glinda. Was there a magic school in Oz in the old days, before the witches? One imagines that it could have been where many of these one-off magic worker characters were educated: Wam, Glegg, Soob, Wumbo, Dr. Pipt from Patchwork Girl, Bini Aru from Magic, Ugu the Shoemaker's ancestors from Lost Princess, the Adepts at Magic from Glinda. One also imagines something like the four wicked witches shutting it down once they deposed Pastoria and divided up Oz, in order to stop any competitors from arising. I always like these glimpses of Oz prehistory! (We also learn about a magic emerald that can take away someone's power of speech for seven years; the ancient emperors of Oz used it on their wives when they wanted to go to war!)
Like Hungry Tiger, and as will be true for our next six Oz books, we read this in a Del Rey edition. I noticed fewer typos in this than Hungry Tiger, but I still mourn the fact that we don't even get black-and-white reproduction of the color plates. Several of the illustrations are in odd places relative to events they describe from the text, but apparently that is true in the first edition as well. Neill goes back to two-page chapter openers here, which yields a large number of great-looking illustrations of the events of the book.
Next up in sequence: The Giant Horse of Oz
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